PART FIVE

I
Anna Regina
1533

The two children sit on a bench in the hall of Austin Friars. They
are so small that their legs stick straight out in front of them, and
as they are still in smocks one cannot tell their sex. Under their
caps, their dimpled faces beam. That they look so fat and
contented is a credit to the young woman, Helen Barre, who
now unwinds the thread of her tale: daughter of a bankrupt small
merchant out of Essex, wife of one Matthew Barre who beat her
and deserted her, ‘leaving me,’ she says, indicating, ‘with that one
in my belly.’
The neighbours are always coming at him with parish problems. Unsafe cellar doors. A noisome goose house. A husband and
wife who shout and bang pans all night, so the next house can’t get
to sleep. He tries not to fret if these things cut into his time, and he
minds Helen less than a goose house. Mentally, he takes her out of
cheap shrunken wool and re-dresses her in some figured velvet he
saw yesterday, six shillings the yard. Her hands, he sees, are
skinned and swollen from rough work; he supplies kid gloves.
‘Though when I say he deserted me, it may be that he is dead.
He was a great drinker and a brawler. A man who knew him told
me he came off worst in a fight, and I should seek him at the
bottom of the river. But someone else saw him on the quays at
Tilbury, with a travelling bag. So which am I – wife or widow?’ ‘I will look into it. Though I think you would rather I didn’t
find him. How have you lived?’
‘When he went first I was stitching for a sailmaker. Since I
came up to London to search, I’ve been hiring out by the day. I
have been in the laundry at a convent near Paul’s, helping at the
yearly wash of their bed linen. They find me a good worker, they
say they will give me a pallet in the attics, but they won’t take the
children.’
Another instance of the church’s charity. He runs up against
them all the time. ‘We cannot have you a slave to a set of
hypocrite women. You must come here. I am sure you will be
useful. The house is filling up all the time, and I am building, as
you see.’ She must be a good girl, he thinks, to turn her back on
making a living in the obvious way; if she walked along the
street, she wouldn’t be short of offers. ‘They tell me you would
like to learn to read, so you can read the gospel.’
‘Some women I met took me to what they call a night school. It
was in a cellar at Broadgate. Before that, I knew Noah, the Three
Kings, and father Abraham, but St Paul I had never heard of. At
home on our farm we had pucks who used to turn the milk and
blow up thunderstorms, but I am told they are not Christians. I
wish we had stayed farming, for all that. My father was no hand at
town life.’ Her eyes, anxious, follow the children. They have
launched themselves off the bench and toddled across the flagstones to see the picture that is growing on the wall, and their every
step causes her to hold her breath. The workman is a German, a
young boy Hans recommended for a simple job, and he turns
around – he speaks no English – to explain to the children what he
is doing. A rose. Three lions, see them jump. Two black birds.
‘Red,’ the elder child cries.
‘She knows colours,’ Helen says, pink with pride. ‘She is also
beginning on one-two-three.’
The space where the arms of Wolsey used to be is being
repainted with his own newly granted arms: azure, on a fess between three lions rampant or, a rose gules, barbed vert,
between two Cornish choughs proper. ‘You see, Helen,’ he says,
‘those black birds were Wolsey’s emblem.’ He laughs. ‘There are
people who hoped they would never see them again.’
‘There are other people, of our sort, who do not understand
it.’
‘You mean night school people?’
‘They say, how can a man who loves the gospel, have loved
such a man as that?’
‘I never liked his haughty manners, you know, and his processions every day, the state he kept. And yet there was never a man
more active in the service of England since England began. And
also,’ he says sadly, ‘when you came into his confidence, he was a
man of such grace and ease … Helen, can you come here today?’
He is thinking of those nuns and the yearly wash of their bed
linen. He is imagining the cardinal’s appalled face. Laundry
women followed his train as whores follow an army, hot from
their hour-by-hour exertions. At York Place he had a bath made,
deep enough for a man to stand up in it, the room heated by a stove
such as you find in the Low Countries, and many a time he had
negotiated business with the cardinal’s bobbing, boiled-looking
head. Henry has taken it over now, and splashes about in it with
favoured gentlemen, who submit to being ducked under the water
and half-drowned by their lord, if his mood takes him that way.
The painter offers the brush to the elder child. Helen glows.
‘Careful, darling,’ she says. A blob of blue is applied. You are a
little adept, the painter says. Gefällt es Ihnen, Herr Cromwell,
sind Sie stolz darauf?’
He says to Helen, he asks if I am pleased and proud. She says,
if you are not, your friends will be proud for you.
I am always translating, he thinks: if not language to language,
then person to person. Anne to Henry. Henry to Anne. Those
days when he wants soothing, and she is as prickly as a holly
bush. Those times – they do occur – when his gaze strays after another woman, and she follows it, and storms off to her own
apartments. He, Cromwell, goes about like some public poet,
carrying assurances of desire, each to each.
It is hardly three o’clock, and already the room is half-dark.
He picks up the younger child, who flops against his shoulder
and falls asleep with the speed at which someone pushed falls off
a wall. ‘Helen,’ he says, ‘this household is full of pert young men,
and they will all put themselves forward in teaching you to read,
bringing you presents and trying to sweeten your days. Do learn,
and take the presents, and be happy here with us, but if anyone is
too forward, you must tell me, or tell Rafe Sadler. He is the boy
with the little red beard. Though I should not say boy.’ It will be
twenty years, soon, since he brought Rafe in from his father’s
house, a lowering, dark day like this, rain bucketing from the
heavens, the child slumped against his shoulder as he carried him
into his hall at Fenchurch Street.
The storms had kept them in Calais for ten days. Ships out of
Boulogne were wrecked, Antwerp flooded, much of the countryside put under water. He would like to get messages to his
friends, enquiring after their lives and property, but the roads are
impassable, Calais itself a floating island upon which a happy
monarch reigns. He goes to the king’s lodgings to ask for an
audience – business doesn’t stop in bad weather – but he is told,
‘The king cannot see you this morning. He and Lady Anne are
composing some music for the harp.’
Rafe catches his eye and they walk away. ‘Let us hope in time
they have a little song to show for it.’
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Norris get drunk together in a low
tavern. They swear eternal friendship. But their followers have a
fight in the inn yard and roll each other in mud.
He never sets eyes on Mary Boleyn. Presumably she and
Stafford have found some bolt-hole where they can compose
together. By candlelight, at noon, Lord Berners shows him his library,
limping energetically from desk to desk, handling with care the old
folios from which he has made his scholarly translations. Here is a
romance of King Arthur: ‘When I started reading it I almost gave
up the project. It was clear to me it was too fantastical to be true.
But little by little, as I read, you know, it appeared to me that there
was a moral in this tale.’ He does not say what it is. ‘And here is
Froissart done into English, which His Majesty himself bade me
undertake. I could not do other, for he had just lent me five
hundred pounds. Would you like to see my translations from the
Italian? They are private ones, I have not sent them to the printer.’
He spends an afternoon with the manuscripts, and they
discuss them at supper. Lord Berners holds a position, chancellor
of the exchequer, which Henry has given him for life, but
because he is not in London and attending to it, it does not bring
him in much money, or the influence it should. ‘I know you are
a good man for business. Might you in confidence look over my
accounts? They’re not what you’d call in order.’
Lord Berners leaves him alone with the dog’s breakfast that he
calls his ledgers. An hour passes: the wind whistles across the
rooftops, the candle flames tremble, hail batters the glass. He
hears the scrape of his host’s bad foot: an anxious face peers
around the door. ‘What joy?’
All he can find is money owing. This is what you get for
devoting yourself to scholarship and serving the king across the
sea, when you could be at court with sharp teeth and eyes and
elbows, ready to seize your advantage. ‘I wish you’d called on
me earlier. There are always things that can be done.’
‘Ah, but who knew you, Master Cromwell?’ the old man says.
‘One exchanged letters, yes. Wolsey’s business, king’s business.
But I never knew you. It did not seem at all likely I should know
you, until now.’
On the day they are finally ready to embark, the boy from the
alchemists’ inn turns up. ‘You at last! What have you got for me?’ The boy displays his empty hands, and launches into English,
of a sort. ‘On dit those magi have retoured to Paris.’
‘Then I am disappointed.’
‘You are hard to find, monsieur. I go to the place where le roi
Henri and the Grande Putain are lodged, “je cherche milord
Cremuel,” and the persons there laughed at me and beat me.’
‘That is because I am not a milord.’
‘In that case, I do not know what a milord in your country
looks like.’ He offers the boy a coin for his efforts, and another
for the beating, but he shakes his head. ‘I thought to take
service with you, monsieur. I have made up my mind to go travelling.’
‘Your name is?’
‘Christophe.’
‘You have a family name?’
‘Ça ne fait rien.’
‘You have parents?’
A shrug.
‘Your age?’
‘What age would you say?’
‘I know you can read. Can you fight?’
‘There is much fighting chez vous?’
Christophe has his own squat build; he needs feeding up, but
a year or two from now he will be hard to knock over. He puts
him at fifteen, no more. ‘You are in trouble with the law?’
‘In France,’ he says, disparagingly: as one might say, in far
Cathay.
‘You are a thief?’
The boy makes a jabbing motion, invisible knife in his fist.
‘You left someone dead?’
‘He didn’t look well.’
He grins. ‘You’re sure you want Christophe for your name?
You can change it now, but not later.’
‘You understand me, monsieur.’ Christ, of course I do. You could be my son. Then he looks
at him closely, to make sure that he isn’t; that he isn’t one of
these brawling children the cardinal spoke of, whom he has left
by the Thames, and not impossibly by other rivers, in other
climes. But Christophe’s eyes are a wide, untroubled blue. ‘You
are not afraid of the sea voyage?’ he asks. ‘In my house in
London there are many French speakers. You’ll soon be one of
us.’
Now at Austin Friars, Christophe pursues him with questions. Those magi, what is it they have? Is it a carte of buried
treasure? Is it – he flaps his arms – the instructions for one to
make a flying machine? Is it a machine to faire great explosions,
or a military dragon, breathes out fire?
He says, ‘Have you ever heard of Cicero?’
‘No. But I am prepared to hear of him. Till today I have never
heard of Bishop Gardineur. On dit you have stole his strawberry
beds and give them to the king’s mistress, and now he intends …’
the boy breaks off, and again gives his impression of a military
dragon, ‘to ruin you utterly and pursue you unto death.’
‘And well beyond, if I know my man.’
There have been worse accounts of his situation. He wants to
say, she is not a mistress, not any more, but the secret – though it
must soon be an open secret – is not his to tell.
Twenty-fifth of January 1533, dawn, a chapel at Whitehall, his
friend Rowland Lee as priest, Anne and Henry take their vows,
confirm the contract they made in Calais: almost in secret, with
no celebration, just a huddle of witnesses, the married pair both
speechless except for the small admissions of intent forced out of
them by the ceremony. Henry Norris is pale and sober: was it
kind to make him witness it twice over, Anne being given to
another man?
William Brereton is a witness, as he is in attendance in the
king’s privy chamber. ‘Are you truly here?’ he asks him. ‘Or are you somewhere else? You gentlemen tell me you can bilocate,
like great saints.’
Brereton glares. ‘You’ve been writing letters up to Chester.’
‘The king’s business. How not?’
They must do this in a mutter, as Rowland joins the hands of
bride and groom. ‘I’ll tell you just once. Keep away from my
family’s affairs. Or you’ll come off worse, Master Cromwell,
than you can imagine.’
Anne is attended by only one lady, her sister. As they leave –
the king towing his wife, hand on her upper arm, towards a little
harp music – Mary turns and gives him a sumptuous smile. She
holds up her hand, thumb and finger an inch apart.
She had always said, I will be the first to know. It will be me
who lets out her bodices.
He calls William Brereton back, politely; he says, you have
made a mistake in threatening me.
He goes back to his office in Westminster. He wonders, does
the king know yet? Probably not.
He sits down to his drafting. They bring in candles. He sees
the shadow of his own hand moving across the paper, his own
unconcealable fist unmasked by velvet glove. He wants nothing
between himself and the weave of the paper, the black running
line of ink, so he takes off his rings, Wolsey’s turquoise and
Francis’s ruby – at New Year, the king slid it from his own
finger and gave it back to him, in the setting the Calais goldsmith had made, and said, as rulers do, in a rush of confidence,
now that will be a sign between us, Cromwell, send a paper
with this and I shall know it comes from your hand even if you
lack your seal.
A confidant of Henry’s who was standing by – it was Nicholas
Carew – had remarked, His Majesty’s ring fits you without
adjustment. He said, so it does.
He hesitates, his quill hovering. He writes, ‘This realm of
England is an Empire.’ This realm of England is an Empire, and so has been accepted in the world, governed by one Supreme
Head and King …
At eleven o’clock, when the day has brightened as much as it
will, he eats dinner with Cranmer in his lodging at Cannon Row,
where he is living till his new dignity is conferred and he can
move into Lambeth Palace. He has been practising his new signature, Thomas Elect of Canterbury. Soon he will dine in state, but
today, like a threadbare scholar, he shoves his papers aside while
some table linen is laid and they bring in the salt fish, over which
he signs a grace.
‘That won’t improve it,’ he says. ‘Who’s cooking for you? I’ll
send someone over.’
‘So, is the marriage made?’ It is like Cranmer to wait to be told:
to work six hours in silent patience, head down over his books.
‘Yes, Rowland was up to his office. He didn’t wed her to
Norris, or the king to her sister.’ He shakes out his napkin. ‘I
know a thing. But you must coax it from me.’
He is hoping that Cranmer, by way of coaxing, will impart the
secret he promised in his letter, the secret written down the side
of the page. But it must have been some minor indiscretion, now
forgotten. And because Canterbury Elect is occupied in poking
uncertainly at scales and skin, he says, ‘She, Anne, she is already
having a child.’
Cranmer glances up. ‘If you tell it in that tone, people will
think you take the credit yourself.’
‘Are you not astonished? Are you not pleased?’
‘I wonder what fish this purports to be?’ Cranmer says with
mild interest. ‘Naturally I am delighted. But I knew it, you see,
because this marriage is clean – why would not God bless it with
offspring? And with an heir?’
‘Of course, with an heir. Look.’ He takes out the papers he has
been working on. Cranmer washes his fishy fingers and hunches
towards the candle flame. ‘So after Easter,’ he says, reading, ‘it
will be against the law and the king’s prerogative to make an appeal in any matter to the Pope. So there is Katherine’s suit dead
and buried. And I, Canterbury, can decide the king’s cause in our
own courts. Well, this has been long enough coming.’
He laughs. ‘You were long enough coming.’ Cranmer was in
Mantua when he heard of the honour the king intended for him.
He began his journey circuitously: Stephen Vaughan met him at
Lyons, and hustled him over the winter roads and through the
snowdrifts of Picardy to the boat. ‘Why did you delay? Doesn’t
every boy want to be an archbishop? Though not me, if I think
back. What I wanted was my own bear.’
Cranmer looks at him, his expression speculative. ‘I’m sure
that could be arranged for you.’
Gregory has asked him, how will we know when Dr Cranmer
is making a joke? He has told him, you won’t, they are as rare as
apple blossom in January. And now, for some weeks, he will be
half-fearful that a bear will turn up at his door. As they part that
day, Cranmer glances up from the table and says, ‘Of course, I
don’t officially know.’
‘About the child?’
‘About the marriage. As I am to be judge in the matter of the
king’s old marriage, it would not be proper for me to hear that
his new one has already taken place.’
‘Right,’ he says. ‘What Rowland gets up to in the early hours
of the morning is a matter for himself alone.’ He leaves Cranmer
with head bowed over the remains of their meal, as if studying to
reassemble the fish.
As our severance from the Vatican is not yet complete, we
cannot have a new archbishop unless the Pope appoints him.
Delegates in Rome are empowered to say anything, promise
anything, pro tem, to get Clement to agree. The king says, aghast,
‘Do you know how much the papal bulls cost, for Canterbury?
And that I shall have to pay for them? And you know how much
it costs to install him?’ He adds, ‘It must be done properly, of
course, nothing omitted, nothing scanted.’ ‘It will be the last money Your Majesty sends to Rome, if it
rests with me.’
‘And do you know,’ the king says, as if he has discovered
something astonishing, ‘that Cranmer has not a penny of his
own? He can contribute nothing.’
He borrows the money, on the Crown’s behalf, from a rich
Genovese he knows called Salvago. To persuade him into the
loan, he sends around to his house an engraving which he knows
Sebastian covets. It shows a young man standing in a garden, his
eyes turned upwards to an empty window, at which it is to be
hoped very soon a lady will appear; her scent hangs already in the
air, and birds on the boughs look enquiringly into the vacancy,
ready to sing. In his two hands the young man holds a book; it is
a book shaped like a heart.
Cranmer sits on committees every day, in back rooms at Westminster. He is writing a paper for the king, to show that even if his
brother’s marriage to Katherine was not consummated, it does not
affect the case for the annulment, for certainly they intended to be
married, and that intention creates affinity; also, in the nights they
spent together, it must have been their intention to make children,
even if they did not go about it the right way. In order not to make
a liar out of Henry or Katherine, one or the other, the committee
men think up circumstances in which the match may have been
partly consummated, or somewhat consummated, and to do this
they have to imagine every disaster and shame that can occur
between a man and a woman alone in a room in the dark. Do you
like the work, he enquires; looking at their hunched and dusty
persons, he judges them to have the experience they need.
Cranmer in his writing keeps calling the queen ‘the most serene
Katherine’, as if to separate her untroubled face, framed by a linen
pillow, from the indignities being forced on her lower body: the
boy’s fumbling and scrabbling, the pawing at her thighs.
Meanwhile Anne, the hidden Queen of England, breaks free
from her gentleman companions as she walks through a gallery at Whitehall; she laughs as she breaks into a trot, almost a skip, and
they reach out to contain her, as if she is dangerous, but she flings
their hands away from her, laughing. ‘Do you know, I have a
great longing to eat apples? The king says it means I am having a
baby, but I tell him no, no, it can’t be that …’ She whirls around,
around again. She flushes, tears bounce out of her eyes and seem
to fly away from her like the waters of an unregulated fountain.
Thomas Wyatt pushes through the crowd. ‘Anne …’ He
snatches at her hands, he pulls her towards him. ‘Anne, hush,
sweetheart … hush …’ She collapses into hiccupping sobs,
folding herself against his shoulder. Wyatt holds her fast; his eyes
travel around, as if he had found himself naked in the road, and is
looking for some traveller to come along with a garment to cover
his shame. Among the bystanders is Chapuys; the ambassador
makes a rapid, purposeful exit, his little legs working, a sneer
stamped on his face.
So that’s the news sped to the Emperor. It would have been
good if the old marriage were out, the new marriage in,
confirmed to Europe before Anne’s happy state were
announced. But then, life is never perfect for the servant of a
prince; as Thomas More used to say, we should not look to go to
Heaven on feather beds.
Two days later he is alone with Anne; she is tucked into a
window embrasure, eyes closed, basking like a cat in a scarce
shaft of winter sun. She stretches out her hand to him, hardly
knowing who he is; any man will do? He takes her fingertips.
Her black eyes snap open. It’s like a shop when the shutters are
taken down: good morning, Master Cromwell, what can we sell
each other today?
‘I am tired of Mary,’ she says. ‘And I would like to be rid of her.’
Does she mean Katherine’s daughter, the princess? ‘She should
be married,’ she says, ‘and out of my way. I never want to have to
see her. I don’t want to have to think about her. I have long imagined her married to some obscure person.

He waits, still wondering.‘I don’t suppose she would be a bad wife, for somebody whowas prepared to keep her chained to the wall.’‘Ah. Mary your sister.’‘What did you think? Oh,’ she laughs, ‘you thought I meantMary the king’s bastard. Well, now you put it in my mind, sheshould be married too. What age is she?’‘Seventeen this year.’‘And still a dwarf?’ Anne doesn’t wait for an answer. ‘I shallfind some old gentleman for her, some very honourable feebleold gentleman, who will get no children on her and whom I willpay to stay away from court. But as for Lady Carey, what is to bedone? She cannot marry you. We tease her that you are herchoice. Some ladies have a secret preference for common men.We say, Mary, oh, how you long to repose in the arms of theblacksmith … even at the thought, you are growing hot.’‘Are you happy?’ he asks her.‘Yes.’ She drops her eyes, and her small hands rest on herribcage. ‘Yes, because of this. You see,’ she says slowly, ‘I wasalways desired. But now I am valued. And that is a differentthing, I find.’He pauses, to let her think her own thoughts: which he seesare precious to her. ‘So,’ she says, ‘you have a nephew Richard, aTudor of sorts, though I am sure I cannot understand how thatcame about.’‘I can draw out for you the tree of descent.’She shakes her head, smiling. ‘I wouldn’t give you the trouble.Since this,’ her fingers slip downwards, ‘I wake up in themorning and I scarcely remember my name. I always wonderedwhy women were foolish, and now I know.’‘You mentioned my nephew.’‘I have seen him with you. He looks a determined boy. Hemight do for her. What she wants are furs and jewels. You cangive her those, can’t you? And a child in the cradle every other year. As for who fathers it, you can make your own householdarrangements about that.’‘I thought,’ he says, ‘that your sister had an attachment?’He doesn’t want revenge: just clarification.‘Does she? Oh well, Mary’s attachments … usually passingand sometimes very odd – as you know, don’t you.’ It’s not aquestion. ‘Bring them to court, your children. Let’s see them.’He leaves her, eyes closing again, edging into marginalwarmth, the small sort of sunbeam that is all February offers.The king has given him lodgings within the old palace at Westminster, for when he works too late to get home. This being so, hehas to walk mentally through his rooms at Austin Friars, pickingup his memory images from where he has left them onwindowsills and under stools and in the woollen petals of theflowers strewn in the tapestry at Anselma’s feet. At the end of along day he takes supper with Cranmer and with Rowland Lee,who stamps between the various working parties, urging themalong. Sometimes Audley joins them, the Lord Chancellor, butthey keep no state, just sit down like a bunch of inky students, andtalk till it’s Cranmer’s bedtime. He wants to work them out, thesepeople, test how far he can rely on them, and find out their weaknesses. Audley is a prudent lawyer who can sift a sentence like acook sifting a sack of rice for grit. An eloquent speaker, he is tenacious of a point, and devoted to his career; now that he’s Chancellor he aims to make an income to go with the office. As for whathe believes, it’s up for negotiation; he believes in Parliament, in theking’s power exercised in Parliament, and in matters of faith …let’s say his convictions are flexible. As for Lee, he wonders if hebelieves in God at all – though it doesn’t stop him having a bishopric in his sights. He says, ‘Rowland, will you take Gregory intoyour household? I think Cambridge has done all that it can forhim. And I admit that Gregory has done nothing for Cambridge.’‘I’ll take him up the country with me,’ Rowland says, ‘when Igo to have a row with the northern bishops. He is a good boy, Gregory. Not the most forward, but I can understand that. We’llmake him useful yet.’‘You don’t intend him for the church?’ Cranmer asks.‘I said,’ growls Rowland, ‘we’ll make him useful.’At Westminster his clerks are in and out, with news and gossipand paperwork, and he keeps Christophe with him, supposedlyto look after his clothes, but really to make him laugh. He missesthe music they have nightly at Austin Friars, and the women’svoices, heard from other rooms.He is at the Tower most days of the week, persuading theforemen to keep their men working through frost and rain;checking the paymaster’s accounts, and making a new inventoryof the king’s jewels and plate. He calls on the Wardens of theMint, and suggests a spot check on the weight of the king’scoinage. ‘What I should like to do,’ he says, ‘is make our Englishcoins so sound that the merchants over the sea won’t even botherweighing them.’‘Do you have authority for this?’‘Why, what are you hiding?’He has written a memorandum for the king, setting out thesources of his yearly revenues, and detailing through whichgovernment offices they pass. It is remarkably concise. The kingreads it and reads it again. He turns the paper over to see ifanything convoluted and inexplicable is written on the back. Butthere is nothing more than meets his eye.‘It’s not news,’ he says, half-apologetic. ‘The late cardinalcarried it in his head. I shall keep calling at the Mint. If YourMajesty pleases.’At the Tower he calls on a prisoner, John Frith. At his request,which does not count for nothing, the prisoner is cleanly keptabove ground, with warm bedding, sufficient food, a supply ofwine, paper, ink; though he has advised him to put away his writings if he hears the key in his lock. He stands by while theturnkey admits him, his eyes on the ground, not liking what he is going to see; but John Frith rises from his table, a gentle, slenderyoung boy, a scholar in Greek, and says, Master Cromwell, Iknew you would come.When he takes Frith’s hands he finds them all bones, cold anddry and with tell-tale traces of ink. He thinks, he cannot be sodelicate, if he has lived so long. He was one of the scholars shutin the cellar at Wolsey’s college, where the Bible men were heldbecause there was no other secure place. When the summerplague struck underground, Frith lay in the dark with thecorpses, till someone remembered to let him out.‘Master Frith,’ he says, ‘if I had been in London when youwere taken –’‘But while you were in Calais, Thomas More was at work.’‘What made you come back into England? No, don’t tell me.If you were going about Tyndale’s work, I had better not knowit. They say you have taken a wife, is that correct? In Antwerp?The one thing the king cannot abide – no, many things he cannotabide – but he hates married priests. And he hates Luther, andyou have translated Luther into English.’‘You put the case so well, for my prosecution.’‘You must help me to help you. If I could get you an audiencewith the king … you would have to be prepared, he is a mostastute theologian … do you think you could soften youranswers, to accommodate him?’The fire is built up but the room is still cold. You cannot getaway from the mists and exhalations of the Thames. Frith says,his voice barely audible, ‘Thomas More still has some credit withthe king. And he has written him a letter, saying,’ he manages tosmile, ‘that I am Wycliffe, Luther and Zwingli rolled togetherand tied up in string – one reformer stuffed inside another, as fora feast you might parcel a pheasant inside a chicken inside agoose. More means to dine on me, so do not injure your credit byasking for mercy. As for softening my answers … I believe, and Iwill say before any tribunal Do not, John.’‘I will say before any tribunal what I will say before my lastjudge – the Eucharist is but bread, of penance we have no need,Purgatory is an invention ungrounded in scripture –’‘If some men come to you and say, come with us, Frith, you gowith them. They will be my men.’‘You think you can take me out of the Tower?’Tyndale’s Bible says, with God shall nothing be unpossible. ‘Ifnot out of the Tower, then when you are taken to be questioned,that will be your chance. Be ready to take it.’‘But to what purpose?’ Frith speaks kindly, as if speaking to ayoung pupil. ‘You think you can keep me at your house and waitfor the king to change his mind? I should have to break out ofthere, and walk to Paul’s Cross, and say before the Londonerswhat I have already said.’‘Your witness cannot wait?’‘Not on Henry. I might wait till I was old.’‘They will burn you.’‘And you think I cannot bear the pain. You are right, I cannot.But they will give me no choice. As More says, it hardly makes aman a hero, to agree to stand and burn once he is chained to astake. I have written books and I cannot unwrite them. I cannotunbelieve what I believe. I cannot unlive my life.’He leaves him. Four o’clock: the river traffic sparse, a fine andpenetrative vapour creeping between air and water.Next day, a day of crisp blue cold, the king comes down in theroyal barge to see the progress of the work, with the new Frenchenvoy; they are confidential, the king walking with a hand on deDinteville’s shoulder, or rather on his padding; the Frenchman iswearing so many layers that he seems broader than the doorways, but he is still shivering. ‘Our friend here must get somesport to warm his blood,’ the king says, ‘and he is a bungler withthe bow – when we went into the butts last, he shook so much Ithought he would shoot himself in the foot. He complains we are not serious falconers, so I have said he should go out with you,Cromwell.’Is this a promise of time off? The king strolls away and leavesthem. ‘Not if it’s cold like this,’ the envoy says. ‘I’m not standingin a field with the wind whistling, it will be the death of me.When shall we see the sun again?’‘Oh, about June. But the falcons will be moulting by then. Iaim to have mine flying again in August, so nil desperandum,monsieur, we shall have some sport.’‘You wouldn’t postpone this coronation, would you?’ It’salways so; after a little chaff and chat, out of his mouth pops anambassador’s purpose. ‘Because when my master made thetreaty, he didn’t expect Henry to be flaunting his supposed wifeand her big belly. If he were to keep her quietly, it would be adifferent matter.’He shakes his head. There will be no postponement. Henryclaims he has the support of the bishops, the nobles, judges,Parliament and the people; Anne’s coronation is his chance toprove it. ‘Never mind,’ he says. ‘Tomorrow we entertain thepapal nuncio. You will see how my master will manage him.’Henry calls down to them, from the walls, ‘Come up here, sir,see the prospect of my river.’‘Do you wonder I shake?’ the Frenchman says with passion.‘Do you wonder I tremble before him? My river. My city. Mysalvation, cut out and embroidered just for me. My personallytailored English god.’ He swears under his breath, and begins toclimb.When the papal nuncio comes to Greenwich, Henry takes himby the hand and tells him frankly how his ungodly councillorstorment him, and how he longs for a return of perfect amity withPope Clement.You could watch Henry every day for a decade and not see thesame thing. Choose your prince: he admires Henry more andmore. Sometimes he seems hapless, sometimes feckless, some times a child, sometimes master of his trade. Sometimes he seemsan artist, in the way his eye ranges over his work; sometimes hishand moves and he doesn’t seem to see it move. If he had beencalled to a lower station in life, he could have been a travellingplayer, and leader of his troupe.At Anne’s command, he brings his nephew to court, Gregorytoo; Rafe the king already knows, for he is always at his elbow. Theking stands gazing for a long time at Richard. ‘I see it. Indeed I do.’There is nothing in Richard’s face, as far as he can see, to showthat he has Tudor blood, but the king is looking at him with theeye of a man who wants relatives. ‘Your grandfather ap Evan thearcher was a great servant to the king my father. You have a finebuild. I should like to see you in the tilt yard. I should like to seeyou carry your colours in the joust.’Richard bows. And then the king, because he is the essence ofcourtesy, turns to Gregory, and says, ‘And you, Master Gregory,you are a very fine young man too.’As the king walks away, Gregory’s face opens in simple pleasure. He puts his hand on his arm, the place the king has touched,as if transferring regal grace to his fingertips. ‘He is very splendid. He is so splendid. Beyond anything I ever thought. And tospeak to me!’ He turns to his father. ‘How do you manage tospeak to him every day?’Richard gives him a sideways look. Gregory thumps him onthe arm. ‘Never mind your grandfather the archer, what wouldhe say if he knew your father was that big?’ He shows betweenfinger and thumb the stature of Morgan Williams. ‘I have beenriding at the ring these many years. I have been riding at theSaracen’s image and putting my lance just so, thud, right over hisblack Saracen’s heart.’‘Yes,’ Richard says patiently, ‘but, squib, you will find a livingknight a tougher proposition than a wooden infidel. You neverthink of the cost – armour of show quality, a stable of trainedhorses . ‘We can afford it,’ he says. ‘It seems our days as foot soldiersare behind us.’That night at Austin Friars he asks Richard to come to speakwith him alone after supper. Possibly he is at fault, in putting it asa business proposition, spelling out to him what Anne hassuggested about his marriage. ‘Build nothing on it. We have yetto get the king’s approval.’Richard says, ‘But she doesn’t know me.’He waits, for objections; not knowing someone, is that anobjection? ‘I won’t force you.’Richard looks up. ‘Are you sure?’When have I, when have I ever forced anyone to do anything,he starts to say: but Richard cuts in, ‘No, you don’t, I agree, it’sjust that you are practised at persuading, and sometimes it’s quitedifficult, sir, to distinguish being persuaded by you from beingknocked down in the street and stamped on.’‘I know Lady Carey is older than you, but she is very beautiful, I think the most beautiful woman at court, and she is not aswitless as everyone thinks, and she has not got any of her sister’smalice in her.’ In a strange way, he thinks, she has been a goodfriend to me. ‘And instead of being the king’s unrecognisedcousin, you would be his brother-in-law. We would all profit.’‘A title, perhaps. For me, and for you. Brilliant matches forAlice and Jo. What about Gregory? A countess at least for him.’Richard’s voice is flat. Is he talking himself into it? It’s hard totell. With many people, most people perhaps, the book of theirheart lies open to him, but there are times when it’s easier to readoutsiders than your own family. ‘And Thomas Boleyn would bemy father-in-law. And Uncle Norfolk would really be ouruncle.’‘Imagine his face.’‘Oh, his face. Yes, one would go barefoot over hot coals to seehis expression.’‘Think about it. Don’t tell anybody.’ Richard goes out with a bob of the head but without anotherword. It seems he interprets ‘don’t tell anybody’ as ‘don’t tellanybody but Rafe’, because ten minutes later Rafe comes in, andstands looking at him, with his eyebrows raised. Red-headedpeople can look quite strained when they are raising eyebrowsthat aren’t really there. He says, ‘You need not tell Richard thatMary Boleyn once proposed herself to me. There’s nothingbetween us. It won’t be like Wolf Hall, if that’s what you’rethinking.’‘And what if the bride thinks different? I wonder you don’tmarry her to Gregory.’‘Gregory is too young. Richard is twenty-three, it is a goodage to marry if you can afford it. And you have passed it – it’stime you married too.’‘I’m going, before you find a Boleyn for me.’ Rafe turns backand says softly, ‘Only this, sir, and I think it is what gives Richardpause … all our lives and fortunes depend now on that lady, andas well as being mutable she is mortal, and the whole history ofthe king’s marriage tells us a child in the womb is not an heir inthe cradle.’In March, news comes from Calais that Lord Berners has died.The afternoon in his library, the storm blowing outside: it seemswhen he looks back a haven of peace, the last hour he had tohimself. He wants to make an offer for his books – a generousone, to help Lady Berners – but the folios seem to have jumpedoff their desks and walked, some in the direction of FrancisBryan, the old man’s nephew, and some to another connection ofhis, Nicholas Carew. ‘Would you forgive his debts,’ he asksHenry, ‘at least for his wife’s lifetime? You know he leaves –’‘No sons.’ Henry’s mind has moved ahead: once I was in thatunhappy state, no sons, but soon I shall have my heir.

He brings Anne some majolica bowls. The word maschio ispainted on the outside, and inside are pictures of plump blond haired babies, each with a coy little phallus. She laughs. The Italians say for a boy you have to keep warm, he tells her. Heat upyour wine to heat up your blood. No cold fruit, no fish.Jane Seymour says, ‘Do you think it’s already decided, what itwill be, or does God decide later? Do you think it knows itself,what it is? Do you think if we could see inside you, we would beable to tell?’‘Jane, I wish you were still down in Wiltshire,’ Mary Sheltonsays.Anne says, ‘You needn’t cut me up, Mistress Seymour. It is aboy, and no one is to say or think otherwise.’ She frowns, andyou can see her bending, concentrating, the great force of herwill.‘I’d like a baby,’ Jane says.‘Watch yourself,’ Lady Rochford tells her. ‘If your bellyshows, mistress, we’ll have you bricked up alive.’‘In her family,’ Anne says, ‘they’d give her a bouquet. Theydon’t know what continence means, down at Wolf Hall.’Jane is flushed and trembling. ‘I meant no harm.’‘Leave her,’ Anne says. ‘It’s like baiting a fieldmouse.’ Sheturns to him. ‘Your bill is not passed yet. Tell me what is thedelay.’The bill, she means, to forbid appeals to Rome. He begins toexplain to her the strength of the opposition, but she raises hereyebrows and says, ‘My father is speaking for you in the Lords,and Norfolk. So who dare oppose us?’‘I shall have it through by Easter, depend upon it.’‘The woman we saw in Canterbury, they say her people areprinting a book of her prophecies.’‘That may be, but I shall make sure no one reads it.’‘They say on St Catherine’s Day last, while we were at Calais,she saw a vision of the so-called princess Mary crowned queen.’Her voice runs on, fluid, rapid, these are my enemies, thisprophetess and those about her, Katherine who is plotting with the Emperor, her daughter Mary the supposed heir, Mary’s oldgoverness Margaret Pole, Lady Salisbury, she and all her familyare my enemies, her son Lord Montague, her son Reginald Polewho is abroad, people talk of his claim to the throne so why canhe not be brought back, his loyalty examined? Henry Courtenay,the Marquis of Exeter, he believes he has a claim, but when myson is born that will put him out of his conceit. Lady Exeter,Gertrude, she is forever complaining that noblemen are beingput down from their places by men of low birth, and you knowwho she means by that.My lady, her sister says softly, do not distress yourself.I am not distressed, Anne says. Her hand over the growingchild, she says calmly, ‘These people want me dead.’The days are still short, the king’s temper shorter. Chapuysbows and writhes before him, twisting and grimacing, as if hehad in mind to ask Henry to dance. ‘I have read with someperplexity certain conclusions reached by Dr Cranmer –’‘My archbishop,’ the king says coldly; at great expense, theanointing has taken place.‘– conclusions regarding Queen Katherine –’‘Who? You mean my late brother’s wife, the Princess of Wales?’‘– for Your Majesty knows that dispensations were issued insuch form as to allow your own marriage to be valid, whether orno that former marriage was consummated.’‘I do not want to hear the word dispensation,’ Henry says. ‘Ido not want to hear you mention what you call my marriage. ThePope has no power to make incest licit. I am no more Katherine’shusband than you are.’Chapuys bows.‘If the contract had not been void,’ Henry says, patient for thelast time, ‘God would not have punished me with the loss of mychildren.’‘We do not know the blessed Katherine is beyond childbearing.’ He looks up with a sly, delicate glance. ‘Tell me, why do you think I do this?’ The king soundscurious. ‘Out of lust? Is that what you think?’Kill a cardinal? Divide your country? Split the church? ‘Itseems extravagant,’ Chapuys murmurs.‘But that is what you think. That is what you tell theEmperor. You are wrong. I am the steward of my country, sir,and if I now take a wife in a union blessed by God, it is to havea son by her.’‘But there is no guarantee that Your Majesty will have a son.Or any living children at all.’‘Why would I not?’ Henry reddens. He is on his feet, shouting, angry tears spilling down his face. ‘Am I not a man like othermen? Am I not? Am I not?’He is a game little terrier, the Emperor’s man; but even heknows that when you’ve made a king cry it’s time to back off. Onthe way out he says – dusting himself down, with his accustomed, self-deprecatory flutter – ‘There is a distinction to bedrawn between the welfare of the country and the welfare of theTudor line. Or do you not think so?’‘So who is your preferred candidate for the throne? Youfavour Courtenay, or Pole?’‘You should not sneer at persons of royal blood.’ Chapuysshakes out his sleeves. ‘At least now I am officially informed ofthe lady’s state, whereas before I could only deduce it fromcertain spectacles of folly I had witnessed … Do you know howmuch you are staking, Cremuel, on the body of one woman? Letus hope no evil comes near her, eh?’He takes the ambassador by the arm, wheels him around.‘What evil? Say what you mean.’‘If you would let go your grip on my jacket. Thank you. Verysoon you resort to manhandling people, which shows, as theysay, your breeding.’ His words are full of bravado, but he istrembling. ‘Look around you and see how by her pride and herpresumption she offends your own nobility. Her own uncle has no stomach for her tricks. The king’s oldest friends make excusesto stay away from court.’‘Wait till she’s crowned,’ he says. ‘Watch them come running.’On 12 April, Easter Sunday, Anne appears with the king atHigh Mass, and is prayed for as Queen of England. His bill wentthrough Parliament just yesterday; he expects a modest reward,and before the royal party go in to break their fast, the kingwaves him over and gives him Lord Berners’s old post, chancellor of the exchequer. ‘Berners suggested you for it.’ Henrysmiles. He likes giving; like a child, he enjoys anticipating howpleased you will be.During Mass, his mind had wandered through the city. Whatnoisome goose houses have they waiting for him at home? Whatrows in the street, what babies left on church steps, what unrulyapprentices with whom he will please have a word? Have Aliceand Jo painted Easter eggs? They are too grown up now, but theyare content to be the children of the house until the next generation comes along. It’s time he put his mind to husbands for them.Anne, if she had lived, could be married by now, and to Rafe, ashe is still not spoken for. He thinks of Helen Barre; how fast shegets on with her reading, how they cannot do without her atAustin Friars. He believes now that her husband is dead, and hethinks, I must talk to her, I must tell her she is free. She is tooproper to show any pleasure, but who would not like to knowthat she is no longer subject to a man like that?Through Mass, Henry keeps up a constant buzz of talk. Hesorts papers and passes them up and down to his councillors;only at the consecration does he throw himself to his knees in afever of reverence, as the miracle takes place and a wafer becomesGod. As soon as the priest says, ‘Ita, missa est,’ he whispers,come to me in my closet, alone.First the assembled courtiers must make their bows to Anne.Her ladies sweep back and leave her alone in a little sunlit space.He watches them, watches the gentlemen and councillors, among whom, on this feast day, are many of the king’s boyhood friends.He watches Sir Nicholas Carew in particular; nothing is wantingin his reverence to his new queen, but he cannot help a downturnof his mouth. Arrange your face, Nicholas Carew, your ancientfamily face. He hears Anne saying, these are my enemies: he addsCarew to the list.Behind the chambers of state are the king’s own rooms, whichonly his intimates see, where he is served by his gentlemen, andwhere he can be free of ambassadors and spies. This is HenryNorris’s ground, and Norris gently congratulates him on his newappointment, and moves away, soft-footed.‘You know Cranmer is to convene a court to make a formaldissolution of the …’ Henry has said he does not want to hearany more about his marriage, so he will not even say the word.‘I have asked him to convene at the priory at Dunstable,because it is, what, ten, twelve miles to Ampthill, where she islodged – so she can send her lawyers, if she likes. Or come tothe court herself. I want you to go to see her, go secretly, justtalk to her –’Make sure she springs no surprises.‘Leave Rafe with me while you are gone.’ At being so easilyunderstood, the king relaxes into good humour. ‘I can rely onhim to say what Cromwell would say. You have a good boythere. And he is better than you are at keeping his face straight. Isee you, when we sit in council, with your hand before yourmouth. Sometimes, you know, I want to laugh myself.’ He dropsinto a chair, covers his face as if to shade his eyes. He sees that,once again, the king is about to cry. ‘Brandon says my sister isdying. There is no more the doctors can do for her. You knowthat fair hair she had once, hair like silver – my daughter had that.When she was seven she was the image of my sister, like a saintpainted on a wall. Tell me, what am I to do with my daughter?’He waits, till he knows it is a real question. ‘Be good to her, sir.Conciliate her. She should not suffer.

‘But I must make her a bastard. I need to settle England on my
lawful children.’
‘Parliament will do it.’
‘Yes.’ He sniffs. Scrubs his tears away. ‘After Anne is crowned.
Cromwell, one thing, and then we will have our breakfast,
because I am really very hungry. This project of a match for my
cousin Richard …’
He thinks his way, rapidly, around the nobility of England.
But no, he sees it’s his Richard, Richard Cromwell. ‘Lady Carey
…’ The king’s voice softens. ‘Well, I have thought it over, and I
think, no. Or at least, not at this time.’
He nods. He understands his reason. When Anne understands
it, she will spit nails.
‘Sometimes it is a solace to me,’ Henry says, ‘not to have to
talk and talk. You were born to understand me, perhaps.’
That is one view of their situations. He was six years or so in
this world before Henry came into it, years of which he made
good use. Henry takes off his embroidered cap, throws it down,
runs his hands through his hair. Like Wyatt’s golden mane, his
hair is thinning, and it exposes the shape of his massive skull. For
a moment he seems like a carved statue, like a simpler form of
himself, or one of his own ancestors: one of the race of giants that
roamed Britain, and left no trace of themselves except in the
dreams of their petty descendants.
He goes back to Austin Friars as soon as he can get away.
Surely he can have one day off? The crowds outside his gate have
dispersed, as Thurston has fed them an Easter dinner. He goes
out to the kitchen first, to give his man a slap on the head and a
gold piece. ‘A hundred open maws, I swear,’ Thurston says. ‘And
by supper time they’ll be round again.’
‘It is a shame there should be beggars.’
‘Beggars my arse. What comes out of this kitchen is so good,
there are aldermen out there, with their hoods up so we don’t
know them. And I have a houseful here, whether you are with us or not – I have Frenchmen, Germans, I have Florentiners, they
all claim to know you and they all want their dinner to their own
liking, I have their servants down here, pinch of that, soupçon of
the other. We must feed fewer, or build another kitchen.’
‘I’ll get it in hand.’
‘Master Rafe says for the Tower you have bought out the
whole of a quarry in Normandy. He says the Frenchmen are all
undermined, and dropping into holes in the ground.’
Such beautiful stone. The colour of butter. Four hundred men
on the payroll, and anyone standing about instantly redeployed
to the building work at Austin Friars. ‘Thurston, don’t let
anybody put pinches or soupçons in our dinner.’ He thinks,
that’s how Bishop Fisher nearly died; unless it was an unboiled
stockpot after all. You could never fault Thurston’s stockpot. He
goes and views it, bubbling away. ‘Where is Richard, do you
know?’
‘Chopping onions on the back step. Oh, you mean Master
Richard? Upstairs. Eating. Where’s anybody?’
He goes up. The Easter eggs, he sees, bear his own unmistakable features. Jo has painted his hat and his hair in one, so he
seems to be wearing a cap with ear-flaps. She has given him at
least two chins. ‘Well, sir,’ Gregory says, ‘it is true you are getting
stout. When Stephen Vaughan was here he could not believe
you.’
‘My master the cardinal waxed like the moon,’ he says. ‘It is a
mystery, because he hardly sat down to dine but he would be
leaping up to deal with some exigency, and even when he was at
the table he could hardly eat for talking. I feel sorry for myself. I
have not broken bread since last night.’ He breaks it, and says,
‘Hans wants to paint me.’
‘I hope he can run fast,’ Richard says.
‘Richard –’
‘Have your dinner.’
‘My breakfast. No, never mind it. Come. ‘The happy bridegroom,’ Gregory says, taunting.
‘You,’ his father threatens him, ‘are going north with Rowland
Lee. If you think I’m a hard man, wait till you meet Rowland.’
In his office, he says, ‘How is your practice in the lists?’
‘Good. Cromwells will knock down all-comers.’
He is afraid for his son; that he will fall, be maimed, be killed.
Afraid for Richard too; these boys are the hope of his house.
Richard says, ‘So am I? The happy bridegroom?’
‘The king says no. It is not because of my family, or your
family – he calls you his cousin. He is, at this moment, his disposition to us, I would say it is excellent. But he needs Mary for
himself. The child is due in late summer and he is afraid to touch
Anne. And he does not wish to resume his celibate life.’
Richard looks up. ‘He said this?’
‘He left me to understand it. And as I understand it, I convey
it to you, and we are both amazed, but we get over it.’
‘I suppose if the sisters were more alike, one could begin to
understand it.’
‘I suppose,’ he says, ‘one could.’
‘And he is the head of our church. No wonder foreigners
laugh.’
‘If he were a model of conduct in his private life, one would be
… surprised … but for me, you see, I can only concern myself
with his kingship. If he were oppressive, if he were to override
Parliament, if he were to pay no heed to the Commons and
govern only for himself … But he does not … so I cannot
concern myself with how he behaves to his women.’
‘But if he were not king …’
‘Oh, I agree. You’d have him locked up. But again, Richard,
leave aside Mary and he has behaved well enough. He hasn’t
filled a nursery with his bastards, as the Scottish kings do. There
have been women, but who can name them? Only Richmond’s
mother, and the Boleyns. He has been discreet.’
‘I dare say Katherine knew their names.’

Who can say he will be a faithful husband? Will you?’
‘I may not get the chance.’
‘On the contrary, I have a wife for you. Thomas Murfyn’s girl?
A Lord Mayor’s daughter is not a bad prospect. And your
fortune will more than match hers, I will make sure of that. And
Frances likes you. I know because I have asked her.’
‘You have asked my wife to marry me?’
‘Since I was dining there yesterday – no point in delay, was
there?’
‘Not really.’ Richard laughs. He stretches back in his chair.
His body – his capable, admirable body, which has impressed the
king so much – is rinsed with relief. ‘Frances. Good. I like
Frances.’
Mercy approves. He cannot think how she would have taken
to Lady Carey; he had not broached the topic with the women.
She says, ‘Don’t leave it too long to make a match for Gregory.
He is very young, I know. But some men never grow up until
they have a son of their own.’
He hasn’t thought about it, but it might be true. In that case,
there’s hope for the kingdom of England.
Two days later he is back at the Tower. The time goes quickly
between Easter and Whit, when Anne will be crowned. He
inspects her new apartments and orders in braziers to help dry
out the plaster. He wants to get on with the frescoes – he wishes
Hans would come down, but he is painting de Dinteville and
says he needs to push on with it, as the ambassador is petitioning
Francis for his recall, a whining letter on every boat. For the new
queen we are not going to have those hunting scenes you see
painted everywhere, or grim virgin saints with the instruments of
their torture, but goddesses, doves, white falcons, canopies of
green leaves. In the distance, cities seated on the hills: in the foreground, temples, groves, fallen columns and hot blue skies delineated, as within a frame, by borders of Vitruvian colours,
quicksilver and cinnabar, burnt ochre, malachite, indigo and purple. He unrolls the sketches the craftsmen have made.
Minerva’s owl spreads her wings across a panel. A barefoot
Diana fits an arrow to her bow. A white doe watches her from
the trees. He scribbles a direction to the overseer: Arrow to be
picked out in gold. All goddesses have dark eyes. Like a wingtip
from the dark, dread brushes him: what if Anne dies? Henry will
want another woman. He will bring her to these rooms. Her eyes
may be blue. We will have to scour away the faces and paint them
again, against the same cities, the same violet hills.
Outside he stops to watch a fight. A stonemason and the
bricklayer’s gaffer are swiping at each other with battens. He
stands in the ring with the trowel men. ‘What’s it about?’
‘Nuffing. Stone men have to fight brick men.’
‘Like Lancaster and York?’
‘Like that.’
‘Have you ever heard of the field called Towton? The king
tells me more than twenty thousand Englishmen died.’
The man gapes at him. ‘Who were they fighting?’
‘Each other.’
It was Palm Sunday, the year 1461. The armies of two kings
met in the driving snow. King Edward the king’s grandfather was
the winner, if you can say there was a winner at all. Corpses made
a bobbing bridge across the river. Uncounted numbers crawled
away, rolled and tumbled in their own blood: some blinded,
some disfigured, some maimed for life.
The child in Anne’s womb is the guarantee of no more civil
war. He is the beginning, the start of something, the promise of
another country.
He walks into the fight. He bellows at them to stop. He gives
them both a push and they bowl over backwards: two crumbly
Englishmen, snappable bones, chalky teeth. Victors of Agincourt. He’s glad Chapuys isn’t there to see. The trees are in full leaf when he rides into Bedfordshire, with a
small train on unofficial business. Christophe rides beside him
and pesters him: you have said you will tell me who is Cicero,
and who is Reginald Pole.
‘Cicero was a Roman.’
‘A general?’
‘No, he left that to others. As I, for example, might leave it to
Norfolk.’
‘Oh, Norferk.’ Christophe subjects the duke to his peculiar
pronunciation. ‘He is one who pisses on your shadow.’
‘Dear God, Christophe! I’ve heard of spitting on someone’s
shadow.’
‘Yes, but we speak of Norferk. And Cicero?’
‘We lawyers try to memorise all his speeches. If any man were
walking around today with all of Cicero’s wisdom in his head he
would be …’ He would be what? ‘Cicero would be on the king’s
side,’ he says.
Christophe is not much impressed. ‘Pole, he is a general?’
‘A priest. That is not quite true … He has offices in the church,
but he has not been ordained.’
‘Why not?’
‘No doubt so he can marry. It is his blood that makes him
dangerous. He is a Plantagenet. His brothers are here in this
kingdom under our eye. But Reginald is abroad and we are afraid
he is plotting with the Emperor.’
‘Send one to kill him. I will go.’
‘No, Christophe, I need you to stop the rain spoiling my
hats.’
‘As you wish.’ Christophe shrugs. ‘But I will kill a Pole when
you require it, it will be my pleasure.’
The manor at Ampthill, once fortified, has airy towers and a
splendid gatehouse. It stands on a hill with views over wooded
countryside; it is a pleasant seat, the kind of house you’d visit
after an illness to get your strength back. It was built with money gained in the French wars, in the days when the English used to
win them.
To accord with Katherine’s new status as Dowager Princess
of Wales, Henry has trimmed her household, but still she is
surrounded by chaplains and confessors, by household officers
each with their own train of menials, by butlers and carvers,
physicians, cooks, scullions, maltsters, harpers, lutenists,
poultry keepers, gardeners, laundresses, apothecaries, and an
entourage of wardrobe ladies, bedchamber ladies and their
maids. But when he is ushered in she nods to her attendants to
withdraw. No one had told her to expect him, but she must
have spies on the road. Hence her nonchalant parade of occupation: a prayer book in her lap, and some sewing. He kneels to
her, nods towards these encumbrances. ‘Surely, madam, one or
the other?’
‘So, English today? Get up, Cromwell. We will not waste our
time, as at our last interview, selecting which language to use.
Because nowadays you are such a busy man.’
Formalities over, she says, ‘First thing. I shall not attend your
court at Dunstable. That is what you have come to find out, is it
not? I do not recognise this court. My case is at Rome, awaiting
the attention of the Holy Father.’
‘Slow, isn’t he?’ He gives her a puzzled smile.
‘I will wait.’
‘But the king wishes to settle his affairs.’
‘He has a man who will do it. I do not call him an archbishop.’
‘Clement issued the bulls.’
‘Clement was misled. Dr Cranmer is a heretic.’
‘Perhaps you think the king is a heretic?’
‘No. Only a schismatic.’
‘If a general council of the church were called, His Majesty
would submit to its judgment.’
‘It will be too late, if he is excommunicate, and put outside the
church.’ ‘We all hope – I am sure you do, madam – that day will never
come.’
‘Nulla salus extra ecclesiam. Outside the church there is no salvation. Even kings come to judgment. Henry knows it, and is afraid.’
‘Madam, give way to him. For the present. Tomorrow, who
knows? Do not cut off every chance of rapprochement.’
‘I hear Thomas Boleyn’s daughter is having a child.’
‘Indeed, but …’
Katherine, above anyone, should know that guarantees
nothing. She takes his meaning; thinks about it; nods. ‘I see
circumstances in which he might turn back to me. I have had
much opportunity to study that lady’s character, and she is
neither patient nor kind.’
It doesn’t matter; she only has to be lucky. ‘In the event they
have no children, you should think of your daughter Lady Mary.
Conciliate him, madam. He may confirm her as his heir. And if
you will give way, he will offer you every honour, and a great
estate.’
‘A great estate!’ Katherine stands up. Her sewing slides from
her skirts, the prayer book hits the floor with a fat leathery
thump, and her silver thimble goes skittering across the boards
and rolls into a corner. ‘Before you make me any more preposterous offers, Master Cromwell, let me offer you a chapter from
my history. After my lord Arthur died, I passed five years in
poverty. I could not pay my servants. We bought in the cheapest
food we could find, coarse food, stale food, yesterday’s fish – any
small merchant kept a better table than the daughter of Spain.
The late King Henry would not let me go back to my father
because he said he was owed money – he haggled over me like
one of the doorstep women who sold us bad eggs. I put my faith
in God, I did not despair, but I tasted the depth of humiliation.’
‘So why would you want to taste it again?’
Face to face. They glare at each other. ‘Assuming,’ he says,
‘humiliation is all the king intends. ‘Say it plainly.’
‘If you are found out in treason the law will take its course
with you, as if you were any other subject. Your nephew is
threatening to invade us in your name.’
‘That will not happen. Not in my name.’
‘That is what I say, madam.’ He softens his tone. ‘I say the
Emperor is busy with the Turks, he is not so fond of his aunt –
saving your presence – that he will raise another army. But others
say, oh, be quiet, Cromwell, what do you know? They say we
must fortify our harbours, we must raise troops, we must put the
country in a state of alert. Chapuys, as you know, continually
agitates with Charles to blockade our ports and impound our
goods and our merchant ships abroad. He urges war in every
dispatch.’
‘I have no knowledge of what Chapuys puts in his dispatches.’
It is a lie so staggering that he has to admire it. Having delivered it, Katherine seems weakened; she sinks down again into
her chair, and before he can do it for her she wearily bends from
the waist to pick up her sewing; her fingers are swollen, and
bending seems to leave her breathless. She sits for a moment,
recovering herself, and when she speaks again she is calm, deliberate. ‘Master Cromwell, I know I have failed you. That is to
say, I have failed your country, which by now is my country
too. The king was a good husband to me, but I could not do that
which is most necessary for a wife to do. Nevertheless, I was, I
am, a wife – you see, do you, that it is impossible for me to
believe that for twenty years I was a harlot? Now the truth is, I
have brought England little good, but I would be loath to bring
her any harm.’
‘But you do, madam. You may not will it, but the harm is
done.’
‘England is not served by a lie.’
‘That is what Dr Cranmer thinks. So he will annul your
marriage, whether you come to the court or not. ‘Dr Cranmer will be excommunicated too. Does it not cause
him a qualm? Is he so lost to everything?’
‘This archbishop is the best guardian of the church, madam,
that we have seen in many centuries.’ He thinks of what Bainham
said, before they burned him; in England there have been eight
hundred years of mystification, just six years of truth and light;
six years, since the gospel in English began to come into the
kingdom. ‘Cranmer is no heretic. He believes as the king
believes. He will reform what needs reformation, that is all.’
‘I know where this will end. You will take the church’s lands
and give them to the king.’ She laughs. ‘Oh, you are silent? You
will. You mean to do it.’ She sounds almost light-hearted, as
people do sometimes when they’re told they’re dying. ‘Master
Cromwell, you may assure the king I will not bring an army
against him. Tell him I pray for him daily. Some people, those
who do not know him as I do, they say, “Oh, he will work his
will, he will have his desire at any price.” But I know that he
needs to be on the side of the light. He is not a man like you, who
just packs up his sins in his saddlebags and carries them from
country to country, and when they grow too heavy whistles up a
mule or two, and soon commands a train of them and a troop of
muleteers. Henry may err, but he needs to be forgiven. I therefore believe, and will continue to believe, that he will turn out of
this path of error, in order to be at peace with himself. And peace
is what we all wish for, I am sure.’
‘What a placid end you make, madam. “Peace is what we all
wish for.” Like an abbess. You are quite sure by the way that you
would not think of becoming an abbess?’
A smile. Quite a broad smile. ‘I shall be sorry if I don’t see you
again. You are so much quicker in conversation than the dukes.’
‘The dukes will be back.’
‘I am braced. Is there news of my lady Suffolk?’
‘The king says she is dying. Brandon has no heart for
anything. I can well believe it,’ she murmurs. ‘Her income as dowager
queen of France dies with her, and that is the greater part of his
revenue. Still, no doubt you will arrange him a loan, at some iniquitous rate of interest.’ She looks up. ‘My daughter will be curious
to know I have seen you. She believes you were kind to her.’
He only remembers giving her a stool to sit on. Her life must
be bleak, if she remembers that.
‘Properly, she should have remained standing, awaiting a sign
from me.’
Her own pain-racked little daughter. She may smile, but she
doesn’t yield an inch. Julius Caesar would have had more
compunction. Hannibal.
‘Tell me,’ she says, testing the ground. ‘The king would read a
letter from me?’
Henry has taken to tearing her letters up unread, or burning
them. He says they disgust him with their expressions of love.
He does not have it in him to tell her this. ‘Then rest for an hour,’
she says, ‘while I write it. Unless you will stay a night with us? I
should be glad of company at supper.’
‘Thank you, but I must start back, the council meets tomorrow. Besides, if I stayed, where would I put my mules? Not to
mention my team of drivers.’
‘Oh, the stables are half-empty. The king makes sure I am kept
short of mounts. He thinks that I will give my household the slip
and ride to the coast and escape on a ship to Flanders.’
‘And will you?’
He has retrieved her thimble; he hands it back; she bounces it
in her hand as if it were a die and she were ready to cast it.
‘No. I shall stay here. Or go where I am sent. As the king wills.
As a wife should.’
Until the excommunication, he thinks. That will free you
from all bonds, as wife, as subject. ‘This is yours too,’ he says. He
opens his palm; in it a needle, tip towards her. The word is about town that Thomas More has fallen into
poverty. He laughs about it with Master Secretary Gardiner.
‘Alice was a rich widow when he married her,’ Gardiner says.
‘And he has land of his own; how can he be poor? And the
daughters, he’s married them well.’
‘And he still has his pension from the king.’ He is sifting
through paperwork for Stephen, who is preparing to appear as
leading counsel for Henry at Dunstable. He has filed away all the
depositions from the Blackfriars hearings, which seem to have
happened in another era.
‘Angels defend us,’ Gardiner says, ‘is there anything you don’t
file?’
‘If we keep on to the bottom of this chest I’ll find your father’s
love letters to your mother.’ He blows dust off the last batch.
‘There you are.’ The papers hit the table. ‘Stephen, what can we
do for John Frith? He was your pupil at Cambridge. Don’t
abandon him.’
But Gardiner shakes his head and busies himself with the
documents, leafing through them, humming under his breath,
exclaiming ‘Well, who’d have known!’ and ‘Here’s a nice point!’
He gets a boat down to Chelsea. The ex-Chancellor is at ease
in his parlour, daughter Margaret translating from the Greek in a
drone barely audible; as he approaches, he hears him pick her up
on some error. ‘Leave us, daughter,’ More says, when he sees
him. ‘I won’t have you in this devil’s company.’ But Margaret
looks up and smiles, and More rises from his chair, a little stiff as
if his back is bad, and offers a hand.
It is Reginald Pole, lying in Italy, who says he is a devil. The
point is, he means it; it’s not an image with him, as in a fable, but
something he takes to be true, as he takes the gospel to be true.
‘Well,’ he says. ‘We hear you can’t come to the coronation
because you can’t afford a new coat. The Bishop of Winchester
will buy you one himself if you’ll show your face on the day.’
‘Stephen? Will he? ‘I swear it.’ He relishes the thought of going back to London
and asking Gardiner for ten pounds. ‘Or the guildsmen will
make a collection, if you like, for a new hat and a doublet as
well.’
‘And how are you to appear?’ Margaret speaks gently, as if she
has been asked to mind two children for the afternoon.
‘They are making something for me. I leave it to others. If I
only avoid exciting mirth, it will be enough.’
Anne has said, you shall not dress like a lawyer on my coronation day. She has called out to Jane Rochford, taking notes like a
clerk: Thomas must go into crimson. ‘Mistress Roper,’ he says,
‘are you not yourself curious to see the queen crowned?’
Her father cuts in, talking over her: ‘It is a day of shame for the
women of England. One can hear them say on the streets – when
the Emperor comes, wives shall have their rights again.’
‘Father, I am sure they take care not to say that in Master
Cromwell’s hearing.’
He sighs. It’s not much, to know that all the merry young
whores are on your side. All the kept women, and the runaway
daughters. Though now Anne is married, she sets herself up for
an example. Already she has slapped Mary Shelton, Lady Carey
tells him, for writing a riddle in her prayer book, and it was not
even an indecent one. The queen sits very erect these days, child
stirring in her belly, needlework in hand, and when Norris and
Weston and their gentlemen friends come swarming into her
apartments, she looks at them, when they lay compliments at her
feet, as if they were strewing her hem with spiders. Unless you
approach her with a Bible text in your mouth, better not
approach her at all.
He says, ‘Has the Maid been up to see you again? The
prophetess?’
‘She has,’ Meg says, ‘but we would not receive her.’
‘I believe she has been to see Lady Exeter. At her invitation.’
‘Lady Exeter is a foolish and ambitious woman,’ More says . ‘I understand the Maid told her that she would be Queen of
England.’
‘I repeat my comment.’
‘Do you believe in her visions? Their holy nature, that is?’
‘No. I think she is an impostor. She does it for attention.’
‘Just that?’
‘You don’t know what young women will do. I have a houseful of daughters.’
He pauses. ‘You are blessed.’
Meg glances up; she recalls his losses, though she never heard
Anne Cromwell demand, why should Mistress More have the
pre-eminence? She says, ‘There were holy maids before this. One
at Ipswich. Only a little girl of twelve. She was of good family,
and they say she did miracles, and she got nothing out of it, no
personal profit, and she died young.’
‘But then there was the Maid of Leominster,’ More says, with
gloomy relish. ‘They say she is a whore at Calais now, and laughs
with her clients after supper at all the tricks she worked on the
believing people.’
So he does not like holy maids. But Bishop Fisher does. He
has seen her often. He has dealings with her. As if taking the
words out of his mouth, More says, ‘Of course, Fisher, he has his
own views.’
‘Fisher believes she has raised the dead.’ More lifts an
eyebrow. ‘But only for so long as it took for the corpse to make
his confession and get absolution. And then he fell down and
died again.’
More smiles. ‘That sort of miracle.’
‘Perhaps she is a witch,’ Meg says. ‘Do you think so? There are
witches in the scriptures. I could cite you.’
Please don’t. More says, ‘Meg, did I show you where I put the
letter?’ She rises, marking with a thread her place in the Greek
text. ‘I have written to this maid, Barton … Dame Elizabeth, we
must call her, now she is a professed nun. I have advised her to leave the realm in tranquillity, to cease to trouble the king with
her prophecies, to avoid the company of great men and women,
to listen to her spiritual advisers, and, in short, to stay at home
and say her prayers.’
‘As we all should, Sir Thomas. Following your example.’ He
nods, vigorously. ‘Amen. And I suppose you kept a copy?’
‘Get it, Meg. Otherwise he may never leave.’
More gives his daughter some rapid instructions. But he is
satisfied that he is not ordering her to fabricate such a letter on
the spot. ‘I would leave,’ he says, ‘in time. I’m not going to miss
the coronation. I’ve got my new clothes to wear. Will you not
come and bear us company?’
‘You’ll be company for each other, in Hell.’
This is what you forget, this vehemence; his ability to make his
twisted jokes, but not take them.
‘The queen looks well,’ he says. ‘Your queen, I mean, not
mine. She seems very comfortable at Ampthill. But you know
that, of course.’
More says, unblinking, I have no correspondence with the,
with the Princess Dowager. Good, he says, because I am watching two friars who have been carrying her letters abroad – I am
beginning to think that whole order of the Franciscans is
working against the king. If I take them and if I cannot persuade
them, and you know I am very persuasive, into confirming my
suspicion, I may have to hang them up by their wrists, and start
a sort of contest between them, as to which one will emerge first
into better sense. Of course, my own inclination would be to
take them home, feed them and ply them with strong drink, but
then, Sir Thomas, I have always looked up to you, and you have
been my master in these proceedings.
He has to say it all before Margaret Roper comes back. He
raps his fingers on the table, to make More sit up and pay attention. John Frith, he says. Ask to see Henry. He will welcome you
like a lost child. Talk to him and ask him to meet Frith face-to face. I’m not asking you to agree with John – you think he’s a
heretic, perhaps he is a heretic – I’m asking you to concede just
this, and to tell it to the king, that Frith is a pure soul, he is a fine
scholar, so let him live. If his doctrine is false and yours is true
you can talk him back to you, you are an eloquent man, you are
the great persuader of our age, not me – talk him back to Rome,
if you can. But if he dies you will never know, will you, if you
could have won his soul?
Margaret’s footstep. ‘Is this it, Father?’
‘Give it to him.’
‘There are copies of the copy, I suppose?’
‘You would expect us,’ the girl says, ‘to take all reasonable care.’
‘Your father and I were discussing monks and friars. How can
they be good subjects of the king, if they owe their allegiance to
the heads of their orders, who are abroad in other countries, and
who are themselves perhaps subjects of the King of France, or
the Emperor?’
‘I suppose they are still Englishmen.’
‘I meet few who behave as such. Your father will enlarge on
what I say.’ He bows to her. He takes More’s hand, holding its
shifting sinews in his own palm; scars vanish, it is surprising how
they do, and now his own hand is white, a gentleman’s hand,
flesh running easily over the joints, though once he thought the
burn marks, the stripes that any smith picks up in the course of
business, would never fade.
He goes home. Helen Barre meets him. ‘I’ve been fishing,’ he
says. ‘At Chelsea.’
‘Catch More?’
‘Not today.’
‘Your robes came.’
‘Yes?’
‘Crimson.’
‘Dear God.’ He laughs. ‘Helen –’ She looks at him; she seems
to be waiting. ‘I haven’t found your husband.’

Her hands are plunged into the pocket of her apron. She shifts
them, as if she were holding something; he sees that one of her
hands is clutching the other. ‘So you suppose he is dead?’
‘It would be reasonable to think so. I have spoken with
the man who saw him go into the river. He seems a good
witness.’
‘So I could marry again. If anybody wanted me.’
Helen’s eyes rest on his face. She says nothing. Just stands. The
moment seems to last a long time. Then: ‘What happened to our
picture? The one with the man holding his heart shaped like a
book? Or do I mean his book shaped like a heart?’
‘I gave it to a Genovese.’
‘Why?’
‘I needed to pay for an archbishop.’
She moves, reluctant, slow. She drags her eyes from his face.
‘Hans is here. He has been waiting for you. He is angry. He says
time is money.’
‘I’ll make it up to him.’
Hans is taking time off from his preparations for the coronation. He is building a living model of Mount Parnassus on
Gracechurch Street, and today he has to put the Nine Muses
through their paces, so he doesn’t like being kept waiting by
Thomas Cromwell. He is banging around in the next room. It
seems he is moving the furniture.
They take Frith to the archbishop’s palace at Croydon, to be
examined by Cranmer. The new archbishop could have seen him
at Lambeth; but the way to Croydon is longer, and lies through
the woods. In the depth of these woods, they say to him, it
would be a bad day for us if you were to give us the slip. For see
how thick the trees are on the Wandsworth side. You could hide
an army in there. We could spend two days searching there, more
– and if you’d gone east, to Kent and the river, you’d be clear
away before we got around to that side. But Frith knows his road; he is going towards his death. They
stand on the path, whistling, talking about the weather. One
pisses, leisurely, against a tree. One follows the flight of a jay
through the branches. But when they turn back, Frith is waiting,
placid, for his journey to resume.
Four days. Fifty barges in procession, furnished by the city
livery companies; two hours from the city to Blackwall, their
rigging hung with bells and flags; a light but brisk breeze, as
ordered from God in his prayers. Reverse order, anchor at the
steps of Greenwich Palace, collect incoming queen in her own
barge – Katherine’s old one, rebadged, twenty-four oars: next her
women, her guard, all the ornaments of the king’s court, all those
proud and noble souls who swore they’d sabotage the event.
Boats packed with musicians; three hundred craft afloat, banners
and pennants flying, the music ringing bank to bank, and each
bank lined with Londoners. Downstream with the tide, led by an
aquatic dragon spitting fire, and accompanied by wild men
throwing fireworks. Sea-going ships discharge their ordnance in
salute.
By the time they reach the Tower the sun is out. It looks as if
the Thames is ablaze. Henry is waiting to greet Anne as she
lands. He kisses her without formality, scooping back her gown,
pinning it at her sides to show her belly to England.
Next, Henry makes knights: a shoal of Howards and Boleyns,
their friends and followers. Anne rests.
Uncle Norfolk is missing the show. Henry has sent him to
King Francis, to reaffirm the most cordial alliance between our
two kingdoms. He is Earl Marshal and should be in charge of the
coronation, but there is another Howard to step in as his deputy,
and besides he, Thomas Cromwell, is running everything,
including the weather.
He has conferred with Arthur Lord Lisle, who will preside at
the coronation banquet: Arthur Plantagenet, a gentle relic of a former age. He is to go to Calais, directly this is over, to replace
Lord Berners as Governor, and he, Cromwell, must brief him
before he goes. Lisle has a long bony Plantagenet face, and he is
tall like his father King Edward, who no doubt had many
bastards, but none so distinguished as this elderly man, bending
his creaky knee in obeisance before Boleyn’s daughter. His wife
Honor, his second wife, is twenty years his junior, small and delicate, a toy wife. She wears tawny silk, coral bracelets with gold
hearts, and an expression of vigilant dissatisfaction, bordering on
the peevish. She looks him up and down. ‘I suppose you are
Cromwell?’ If a man spoke to you in that tone, you’d invite him
to step outside and ask someone to hold your coat.
Day Two: bringing Anne to Westminster. He is up before first
light, watching from the battlements as thin clouds disperse over
the Bermondsey bank, and an early chill as clear as water is
replaced by a steady, golden heat.
Her procession is led by the retinue of the French ambassador.
The judges in scarlet follow, the Knights of the Bath in blueviolet of antique cut, then the bishops, Lord Chancellor Audley
and his retinue, the great lords in crimson velvet. Sixteen knights
carry Anne in a white litter hung with silver bells which ring at
each step, at each breath; the queen is in white, her body shimmering in its strange skin, her face held in a conscious solemn
smile, her hair loose beneath a circle of gems. After her, ladies on
palfreys trapped with white velvet; and ancient dowagers in their
chariots, their faces acidulated.
At every turn on the route there are pageants and living
statues, recitations of her virtue and gifts of gold from city
coffers, her white falcon emblem crowned and entwined with
roses, and blossom mashed and minced under the treading feet
of the stout sixteen, so scent rises like smoke. The route is hung
with tapestries and banners, and at his orders the ground
beneath the horses’ hooves is gravelled to prevent slipping, and
the crowds restrained behind rails in case of riots and crush; every law officer London can muster is among the crowd,
because he is determined that in time to come, when this is
remembered and told to those who were not here, no one is
going to say, oh, Queen Anne’s coronation, that was the day I
got my pocket picked. Fenchurch Street, Leadenhall, Cheap,
Paul’s Churchyard, Fleet, Temple Bar, Westminster Hall. So
many fountains flowing with wine that it’s hard to find one
flowing with water. And looking down on them, the other
Londoners, those monsters who live in the air, the city’s
uncounted population of stone men and women and beasts, and
things that are neither human nor beasts, fanged rabbits and
flying hares, four-legged birds and pinioned snakes, imps with
bulging eyes and ducks’ bills, men who are wreathed in leaves or
have the heads of goats or rams;: creatures with knotted coils
and leather wings, with hairy ears and cloven feet, horned and
roaring, feathered and scaled, some laughing, some singing,
some pulling back their lips to show their teeth; lions and friars,
donkeys and geese, devils with children crammed into their
maws, all chewed up except for their helpless paddling feet;
limestone or leaden, metalled or marbled, shrieking and sniggering above the populace, hooting and gurning and dry-heaving
from buttresses, walls and roofs.
That night, the king permitting, he goes back to Austin Friars.
He visits his neighbour Chapuys, who has secluded himself from
the events of the day, bolting his shutters and stuffing his ears
against the fanfares, the ceremonial cannon fire. He goes in a
small satirical procession led by Thurston, taking the ambassador sweetmeats to ease his sulks, and some fine Italian wine sent
to him by the Duke of Suffolk.
Chapuys greets him without a smile. ‘Well, you have
succeeded where the cardinal failed, Henry has what he wants at
last. I say to my master, who is capable of looking at these things
impartially, it is a pity from Henry’s point of view that he did not
take up Cromwell years ago. His affairs would have gone on much better.’ He is about to say, the cardinal taught me everything, but Chapuys talks over him. ‘When the cardinal came to a
closed door he would flatter it – oh beautiful yielding door! Then
he would try tricking it open. And you are just the same, just the
same.’ He pours himself some of the duke’s present. ‘But in the
last resort, you just kick it in.’
The wine is one of those big, noble wines that Brandon
favours, and Chapuys drinks appreciatively and says I don’t
understand it, nothing do I understand in this benighted country.
Is Cranmer Pope now? Or is Henry Pope? Perhaps you are
Pope? My men who were among the press today say they heard
few voices raised for the concubine, and plenty who called upon
God to bless Katherine, the rightful queen.
Did they? I don’t know what city they were in.
Chapuys sniffs: they may well wonder. These days it is
nothing but Frenchmen about the king, and she, Boleyn, she is
half-French herself, and wholly bought by them; her entire
family are in the pocket of Francis. But you, Thomas, you are not
taken in by these Frenchmen, are you?
He reassures him: my dear friend, not for one instant.
Chapuys weeps; it’s unlike him: all credit to the noble wine. ‘I
have failed my master the Emperor. I have failed Katherine.’
‘Never mind.’ He thinks, tomorrow is another battle, tomorrow is another world.
He is at the abbey by dawn. The procession is forming up by six.
Henry will watch the coronation from a box screened by a
lattice, sequestered in the painted stonework. When he puts his
head in about eight o’clock the king is already sitting expectantly
on a velvet cushion, and a kneeling servant is unpacking his
breakfast. ‘The French ambassador will be joining me,’ Henry
says; and he meets that gentleman as he is hurrying away.
‘One hears you have been painted, Maître Cremuel. I too have
been painted. You have seen the result? ‘Not yet. Hans is so occupied.’ Even on this fine morning,
here beneath fan vaulting the ambassador looks blue-tinged.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘it appears that with the coronation of this queen,
our two nations have reached a state of perfect amity. How to
improve on perfection? I ask you, monsieur.’
The ambassador bows. ‘Downhill from here?’
‘Let’s try, you know. To maintain a state of mutual usefulness.
When our sovereigns are once again snapping at each other.’
‘Another Calais meeting?’
‘Perhaps in a year.’
‘No sooner?’
‘I will not put my king on the high seas for no cause.’
‘We’ll talk, Cremuel.’ Flat-palmed, the ambassador taps him
on the chest, over the heart.
Anne’s procession forms up at nine. She is mantled in purple
velvet, edged in ermine. She has seven hundred yards to walk, on
the blue cloth that stretches to the altar, and her face is entranced.
Far behind her, the dowager duchess of Norfolk, supporting her
train; nearer, holding up the hem of her long robe, the Bishop of
Winchester at one side, the Bishop of London at the other. Both
of them, Gardiner and Stokesley, were king’s men in the matter
of the divorce; but now they look as if they wish they were far
distant from the living object of his remarriage, who has a fine
sheen of sweat on her high forehead, and whose compressed lips
– by the time she reaches the altar – seem to have vanished into
her face. Who says two bishops should hold up her hem? It’s all
written down in a great book, so old that one hardly dare touch
it, breathe on it; Lisle seems to know it by heart. Perhaps it
should be copied and printed, he thinks.
He makes a mental note, and then concentrates his will on
Anne: Anne not to stumble, as she folds herself towards the
ground to lie face-down in prayer before the altar, her attendants stepping forward to support her for the crucial twelve
inches before belly hits sacred pavement. He finds himself praying: this child, his half-formed heart now beating against
the stone floor, let him be sanctified by this moment, and let him
be like his father’s father, like his Tudor uncles; let him be hard,
alert, watchful of opportunity, wringing use from the smallest
turn of fortune. If Henry lives twenty years, Henry who is
Wolsey’s creation, and then leaves this child to succeed him, I
can build my own prince: to the glorification of God and the
commonwealth of England. Because I will not be too old. Look
at Norfolk, already he is sixty, his father was seventy when he
fought at Flodden. And I shall not be like Henry Wyatt and say,
now I am retiring from affairs. Because what is there, but
affairs?
Anne, shaky, is back on her feet. Cranmer, in a dense cloud of
incense, is pressing into her hand the sceptre, the rod of ivory,
and resting the crown of St Edward briefly on her head, before
changing for a lighter and more bearable crown: a prestidigitation, his hands as supple as if he’d been shuffling crowns all his
life. The prelate looks mildly excited, as if someone had offered
him a cup of warm milk.
Anointed, Anna withdraws, incense billowing around her,
swallowed into its murk: Anna Regina, to a bedchamber
provided for her, to prepare for the feast in Westminster Hall. He
pushes unceremoniously through the dignitaries – all you, all
you who said you would not be here – and catches sight of
Charles Brandon, Constable of England, mounted on his white
horse and ready to ride into the hall among them. He is a huge,
blazing presence, from which he withdraws his sight; Charles, he
thinks, will not outlive me either. Back into the dimness, towards
Henry. Only one thing checks him, the sight, whisking around a
corner, of the hem of a scarlet robe; no doubt it is one of the
judges, escaped from his procession.
The Venetian ambassador is blocking the entrance to Henry’s
box, but the king waves him aside, and says, ‘Cromwell, did not
my wife look well, did she not look beautiful? Will you go and see her, and give her …’ he looks around, for some likely present,
then wrenches a diamond from his knuckle, ‘will you give her
this?’ He kisses the ring. ‘And this too?’
‘I shall hope to convey the sentiment,’ he says, and sighs, as if
he were Cranmer.
The king laughs. His face is alight. ‘This is my best,’ he says.
‘This is my best day.’
‘Until the birth, Majesty,’ says the Venetian, bowing.
It is Mary Howard, Norfolk’s little daughter, who opens the
door to him.
‘No, you most certainly cannot come in,’ she says. ‘Utterly
not. The queen is undressed.’
Richmond is right, he thinks; she has no breasts at all. Still. For
fourteen. I’ll charm this small Howard, he thinks, so he stands
spinning words around her, complimenting her gown and her
jewels, till he hears a voice from within, muffled like a voice from
a tomb; and Mary Howard jumps and says, oh, all right, if she
says so you can see her.
The bedcurtains are drawn close. He pulls them back. Anne is
lying in her shift. She looks flat as a ghost, except for the shocking mound of her six-month child. In her ceremonial robes, her
condition had hardly showed, and only that sacred instant, as she
lay belly-down to stone, had connected him to her body, which
now lies stretched out like a sacrifice: her breasts puffy beneath
the linen, her swollen feet bare.
‘Mother of God,’ she says. ‘Can you not leave Howard
women alone? For an ugly man, you are very sure of yourself.
Let me look at you.’ She bobs her head up. ‘Is that crimson? It’s
a very black crimson. Did you go against my orders?’
‘Your cousin Francis Bryan says I look like a travelling bruise.’
‘A contusion on the body politic.’ Jane Rochford laughs.
‘Can you do this?’ he asks: almost doubting, almost tender.
‘You are exhausted. Oh, I think she will bear up.’ There is no sisterly pride in
Mary’s voice. ‘She was born for this, was she not?’
Jane Seymour: ‘Is the king watching?’
‘He is proud of her.’ He speaks to Anne, stretched out on her
catafalque. ‘He says you have never looked more beautiful. He
sends you this.’
Anne makes a little sound, a moan, poised between gratitude
and boredom: oh, what, another diamond?
‘And a kiss, which I said he had better bring in person.’
She shows no sign of taking the ring from him. It is almost
irresistible, to place it on her belly and walk away. Instead he
hands it to her sister. He says, ‘The feast will wait for you, Highness. Come only when you feel ready.’
She levers herself upright, with a gasp. ‘I am coming now.’ Mary
Howard leans forward and rubs her lower back, with an unpractised hand, a fluttering virginal motion as if she were stroking a
bird. ‘Oh, get away,’ the anointed queen snaps. She looks sick.
‘Where were you last evening? I wanted you. The streets cheered
for me. I heard them. They say the people love Katherine, but
really, it is just the women, they pity her. We will show them something better. They will love me, when this creature is out of me.’
Jane Rochford: ‘Oh, but madam, they love Katherine because
she is the daughter of two anointed sovereigns. Make your mind
up to it, madam – they will never love you, any more than they
love … Cromwell here. It is nothing to do with your merits. It is
a point of fact. There is no use trying to evade it.’
‘Perhaps enough,’ Jane Seymour says. He turns to her and sees
something surprising; she has grown up.
‘Lady Carey,’ Jane Rochford says, ‘we must get your sister on
her feet now and back in her robes, so see Master Cromwell out
and enjoy your usual confabulation. This is not a day to break
with tradition.’
At the door: ‘Mary?’ he says. Notices the dark stains under
her eyes. Yes?’ She speaks in a tone of ‘yes, and what is it now?’
‘I am sorry the marriage with my nephew did not come off.’
‘Not that I was ever asked, of course.’ She smiles tightly. ‘I
shall never see your house. And one hears so much of it.’
‘What do you hear?’
‘Oh … of chests bursting with gold pieces.’
‘We would never allow that. We would get bigger chests.’
‘They say it is the king’s money.’
‘It’s all the king’s money. His image is on it. Mary, look,’ he
takes her hand, ‘I could not dissuade him from his liking for you.
He –’
‘How hard did you try?’
‘I wish you were safe with us. Though of course it was not the
great match you might expect, as the queen’s sister.’
‘I doubt there are many sisters who expect what I receive,
nightly.’
She will get another child by Henry, he thinks. Anne will have
it strangled in the cradle. ‘Your friend William Stafford is at
court. At least, I think he is still your friend?’
‘Imagine how he likes my situation. Still, at least I get a kind
word from my father. Monseigneur finds he needs me again. God
forbid the king should ride a mare from any other stable.’
‘This will end. He will free you. He will give you a settlement.
A pension. I’ll speak for you.’
‘Does a dirty dishcloth get a pension?’ Mary sways on the
spot; she seems dazed with misery and fatigue; great tears swell
in her eyes. He stands catching them, dabbing them away, whispering to her and soothing her, and wanting to be elsewhere.
When he breaks free he gives her a backward glance, as she stands
in the doorway, desolate. Something must be done for her, he
thinks. She’s losing her looks.
Henry watches from a gallery, high above Westminster Hall, as
his queen takes her seat in the place of honour, her ladies around her, the flower of the court and the nobility of England. The king
has fortified himself earlier, and is picking at a spice plate,
dipping thin slices of apple into cinnamon. In the gallery with
him, encore les ambassadeurs, Jean de Dinteville furred against
the June chill, and his friend the Bishop of Lavaur, wrapped in a
fine brocade gown.
‘This has all been most impressive, Cremuel,’ de Selve says;
astute brown eyes study him, taking everything in. He takes in
everything too: stitching and padding, studding and dyeing; he
admires the deep mulberry of the bishop’s brocade. They say
these two Frenchmen favour the gospel, but favour at François’s
court extends no further than a small circle of scholars that the
king, for his own vanity, wishes to patronise; he has never quite
been able to grow his own Thomas More, his own Erasmus,
which naturally piques his pride.
‘Look at my wife the queen.’ Henry leans over the gallery. He
might as well be down there. ‘She is worth the show, is she not?’
‘I have had all the windows reglazed,’ he says. ‘The better to
see her.’
‘Fiat lux,’ de Selve murmurs.
‘She has done very well,’ de Dinteville says. ‘She must have
been six hours on her feet today. One must congratulate Your
Majesty on obtaining a queen who is as strong as a peasant
woman. I mean no disrespect, of course.’
In Paris they are burning Lutherans. He would like to take it
up with the envoys, but he cannot while the odour of roast swan
and peacock drifts up from below.
‘Messieurs,’ he asks (music rising around them like a shallow
tide, silver ripples of sound), ‘do you know of the man Guido
Camillo? I hear he is at your master’s court.’
De Selve and his friend exchange glances. This has thrown
them. ‘The man who builds the wooden box,’ Jean murmurs.
‘Oh yes.’
‘It is a theatre,’ he says. De Selve nods. ‘In which you yourself are the play.’
‘Erasmus has written to us about it,’ Henry says, over his
shoulder. ‘He is having the cabinetmakers create him little
wooden shelves and drawers, one inside another. It is a memory
system for the speeches of Cicero.’
‘With your permission, he intends it as more than that. It is a
theatre on the ancient Vitruvian plan. But it is not to put on
plays. As my lord the bishop says, you as the owner of the
theatre are to stand in the centre of it, and look up. Around you
there is arrayed a system of human knowledge. Like a library, but
as if – can you imagine a library in which each book contains
another book, and a smaller book inside that? Yet it is more than
that.’
The king slips into his mouth an aniseed comfit, and snaps
down on it. ‘Already there are too many books in the world.
There are more every day. One man cannot hope to read them
all.’
‘I do not see how you understand so much about it,’ de Selve
says. ‘All credit to you, Maître Cremuel. Guido will only speak
his own Italian dialect, and even in that he stammers.’
‘If it pleases your master to spend his money,’ Henry says. ‘He
is not a sorcerer, is he, this Guido? I should not like Francis to
fall into the hands of a sorcerer. By the way, Cromwell, I am
sending Stephen back to France.’
Stephen Gardiner. So the French do not like doing business
with Norferk. Not surprising. ‘His mission will be of some duration?’
De Selve catches his eye. ‘But who will do Master Secretary’s
job?’
‘Oh, Cromwell will do it. Won’t you?’ Henry smiles.
He is hardly down into the body of the hall before Master Wriothesley intercepts him. This is a big day for the heralds and their
officers, their children and their friends; fat fees coming their way. He says so, and Call-Me says, fat fees coming your way. He
edges back against the screens, voice low; one could foresee this,
he says, because Henry is tired of it, Winchester’s grinding opposition to him every step of the way. He is tired of arguing; now he
is a married man he looks for a little more douceur. With Anne?
he says and Call-Me laughs: you know her better than me, if as
they say she is a lady with a sharp tongue, then all the more he
needs ministers who are kind to him. So devote yourself to
keeping Stephen abroad, and in time he will confirm you in the
post.
Christophe, dressed up for the afternoon, is hovering nearby
and making signals to him. You will excuse me, he says, but
Wriothesley touches his gown of crimson, as if for luck, and
says, you are the master of the house and the master of the
revels, you are the origin of the king’s happiness, you have done
what the cardinal could not, and much more besides. Even this –
he gestures around him, to where the nobility of England,
having already eaten their words, are working through twentythree dishes – even this feast has been superbly managed. No
one need call for anything, it is all at his hand before he thinks of
it.
He inclines his head, Wriothesley walks away, and he beckons
the boy. Christophe says, one tells me to impart nothing of confidence in the hearing of Call-Me, as Rafe says he go trit-trot to
Gardineur with anything he can get. Now sir, I have a message,
you must go quick to the archbishop. When the feast is done. He
glances up to the dais where the archbishop sits beside Anne,
under her canopy of state. Neither of them is eating, though
Anne is pretending to, both of them are scanning the hall.
‘I go trit-trot,’ he says. He is taken with the phrase. ‘Where?’
‘His old lodging which he says you know. He wishes you to
be secret. He says not to bring any person.’
‘Well, you can come, Christophe. You’re not a person.’
The boy grins.

He is apprehensive; does not quite like the thought of the
abbey precincts, the drunken crowds at dusk, without somebody
to watch his back. Unfortunately, a man cannot have two fronts.
They have almost reached Cranmer’s lodging when fatigue
enwraps his shoulders, an iron cloak. ‘Pause for a moment,’ he
says to Christophe. He has hardly slept these last nights. He
takes a breath, in shadow; here it is cold, and as he passes into the
cloisters he is dipped in night. The rooms around are shuttered,
empty, no sound from within. From behind him, an inchoate
shouting from the Westminster streets, like the cries of those lost
after a battle.
Cranmer looks up; he is already at his desk. ‘These are days we
will never forget,’ he says. ‘No one who has missed it would
believe it. The king spoke warm words in your praise today. I
think it was intended I should convey them.’
‘I wonder why I ever gave any thought to the cost of brickmaking for the Tower. It seems such a small item now. And
tomorrow the jousts. Will you be there? My boy Richard is listed
for the bouts on foot, fighting in single combat.’
‘He will prevail,’ Christophe declares. ‘Biff, and one is flat,
never to rise again.’
‘Hush,’ Cranmer says. ‘You are not here, child. Cromwell,
please.’
He opens a low door at the back of the chamber. He dips his
head, and framed by the doorway in the half light he sees a table,
a stool, and on the stool a woman sitting, young, tranquil, her
head bowed over a book. She looks up. ‘Ich bitte Sie, ich brauch’
eine Kerze.’
‘Christophe, a candle for her.’
The book before her he recognises; it is a tract of Luther’s.
‘May I?’ he says, and picks it up.
He finds himself reading. His mind leaps along the lines. Is she
some fugitive Cranmer is sheltering? Does he know the cost if she is taken? He has time to read half a page, before the archbishop trickles in, like a late apology. ‘This woman is …?’
Cranmer says, ‘Margarete. My wife.’
‘Dear God.’ He slams Luther down on the table. ‘What have
you done? Where did you find her? Germany, evidently. This is
why you were slow to return. I see it now. Why?’
Cranmer says meekly, ‘I could not help it.’
‘Do you know what the king will do to you when he finds you
out? The master executioner of Paris has devised a machine, with
a counterweighted beam – shall I draw it for you? – which when
a heretic is burned dips him into the fire and lifts him out again,
so that the people can see the stages of his agony. Now Henry
will be wanting one. Or he will get some device to tease your
head off your shoulders, over a period of forty days.’
The young woman looks up. ‘Mein Onkel –’
‘Who is that?’
She names a theologian, Andreas Osiander: a Nuremberger, a
Lutheran. Her uncle and his friends, she says, and the learned
men of her town, they believe –
‘It may be the belief in your country, madam, that a pastor
should have a wife, but not here. Did Dr Cranmer not warn you
of this?’
‘Please,’ Cranmer begs, ‘tell me what she is saying. Does she
blame me? Is she wishing herself at home?’
‘No. No, she says you are kind. What took hold of you, man?’
‘I told you I had a secret.’
So you did. Down the side of the page. ‘But to keep her here,
under the king’s nose?’
‘I have kept her in the country. But I could not refuse her wish
to see the celebrations.’
‘She has been out on the streets?’
‘Why not? No one knows her.’
True. The protection of the stranger in the city; one young
woman in a cheerful cap and gown, one pair of eyes among the thousands of eyes: you can hide a tree in a forest. Cranmer
approaches him. He holds out his hands, so lately smeared with
the sacred oil; fine hands, long fingers, the pale rectangles of his
palms crossed and recrossed by news of sea voyages and
alliances. ‘I asked you here as my friend. For I count you my
chief friend, Cromwell, in this world.’
So there is nothing to do, in friendship, but to take these bony
digits in his own. ‘Very well. We will find a way. We will keep
your lady secret. I only wonder that you did not leave her with
her own family, till we can turn the king our way.’
Margarete is watching them, blue eyes flitting from face to face.
She stands up. She pushes the table away from her; he watches her
do it, and his heart lurches. Because he has seen a woman do this
before, his own wife, and he has seen how she puts her palms
down on the surface, to haul herself up. Margarete is tall, and the
bulge of her belly juts above the table top.
‘Jesus,’ he says.
‘I hope for a daughter,’ the archbishop says.
‘About when?’ he asks Margarete.
Instead of answering, she takes his hand. She places it on her
belly, pressing it down with her own. At one with the celebrations, the child is dancing: spanoletta, Estampie Royal. This is a
perhaps a foot; this is a fist. ‘You need a friend,’ he says. ‘A
woman with you.’
Cranmer follows him as he pounds out of the room. ‘About
John Frith …’ he says.
‘What?’
‘Since he was brought to Croydon, I have seen him three times
in private conversation. A worthy young man, a most gentle
creature. I have spent hours, I regret not a second of it, but I
cannot turn him from his path.’
‘He should have run into the woods. That was his path.’
‘We do not all …’ Cranmer drops his gaze. ‘Forgive me, but
we do not all see as many paths as you.’ ‘So you must hand him to Stokesley now, because he was
taken in Stokesley’s diocese.’
‘I never thought, when the king gave me this dignity, when he
insisted I occupy this seat, that among my first actions would be
to come against a young man like John Frith, and to try to argue
him out of his faith.’
Welcome to this world below. ‘I cannot much longer delay,’
Cranmer says.
‘Nor can your wife.’
The streets around Austin Friars are almost deserted. Bonfires
are starting up across the city, and the stars are obscured by
smoke. His guards are on the gate: sober, he is pleased to note.
He stops for a word; there is an art to being in a hurry but not
showing it. Then he walks in and says, ‘I want Mistress Barre.’
Most of his household have gone to see the bonfires, and they
will be out till midnight, dancing. They have permission to do
this; who should celebrate the new queen, if they do not? John
Page comes out: something want doing, sir? William Brabazon,
pen in hand, one of Wolsey’s old crew: the king’s business never
stops. Thomas Avery, fresh from his accounts: there’s always
money flowing in, money flowing out. When Wolsey fell, his
household deserted him, but Thomas Cromwell’s servants
stayed to see him through.
A door bangs overhead. Rafe comes down, boots clattering,
hair sticking up. He looks flushed and confused. ‘Sir?’
‘I don’t want you. Is Helen here, do you know?’
‘Why?’
At that moment Helen appears. She is fastening up her
hair under a clean cap. ‘I need you to pack a bag and come with
me.’
‘For how long, sir?’
‘I cannot say.’
‘To go out of London?’ He thinks, I’ll make some arrangement, the wives and daughters of men in the city, discreet women, they will find her
servants, and a midwife, some competent woman who will put
Cranmer’s child into his hands. ‘Perhaps for a short time.’
‘The children –’
‘We will take care of your children.’
She nods. Speeds away. You wish you had men in your service
as swift as she. Rafe calls after her. ‘Helen …’ He looks irate.
‘Where is she going, sir? You can’t just drag her off into the
night.’
‘Oh, I can,’ he says mildly.
‘I need to know.’
‘Believe me, you don’t.’ He relents. ‘Or if you do, this is not
the time – Rafe, I’m tired. I’m not going to argue.’
He could perhaps leave it to Christophe, and some of the more
unquestioning members of his household, to take Helen from
the warmth of Austin Friars to the chill of the abbey precincts; or
he could leave it till the morning. But his mind is alive to the
loneliness of Cranmer’s wife, the strangeness of the city en fête,
the deserted aspect of Cannon Row, where even in the shadow of
the abbey robbers are bound to lurk. Even in the time of King
Richard the district was home to gangs of thieves, who issued out
by night at their pleasure, and when the dawn came swarmed
back to claim the privilege of sanctuary, and no doubt to share
the spoils with the clergy. I shall clean out that lot, he thinks. My
men will be after them like ferrets down a hole.
Midnight: stone exhales a mossy breath, flagstones are slippery with the city’s exhalations. Helen puts her hand into his. A
servant admits them, eyes downcast; he slips him a coin to raise
his eyes no higher. No sign of the archbishop: good. A lamp is lit.
A door pushed ajar. Cranmer’s wife is lying in a little cot. He says
to Helen, ‘Here is a lady who needs your compassion. You see
her situation. She does not speak English. In any case, you need
not ask her name.’ ‘Here is Helen,’ he says. ‘She has two children of her own. She
will help you.’
Mistress Cranmer, her eyes closed, merely nods and smiles.
But when Helen places a gentle hand on her, she reaches out and
strokes it.
‘Where is your husband?’
‘Er betet.’
‘I hope he is praying for me.’
The day of Frith’s burning he is hunting with the king over the
country outside Guildford. It is raining before dawn, a gusty,
tugging wind bending the treetops: raining all over England,
soaking the crops in the fields. Henry’s mood is not to be dented.
He sits down to write to Anne, left back at Windsor. After he has
twirled his quill in his fingers, turned his paper about and about,
he loses the will: you write it for me, Cromwell. I’ll tell you what
to put.
A tailor’s apprentice is going to the stake with Frith: Andrew
Hewitt.
Katherine used to have relics brought to her, Henry says, for
when she was in labour with her children. A girdle of the Blessed
Virgin. I hired it.
I don’t think the queen will want that.
And special prayers to St Margaret. These are women’s things.
Best left to them, sir.
Later he will hear that Frith and the boy suffered, the wind
blowing the flames away from them repeatedly. Death is a
japester; call him and he will not come. He is a joker and he lurks
in the dark, a black cloth over his face.
There are cases of the sweat in London. The king, who
embodies all his people, has all the symptoms every day.
Now Henry stares at the rain falling. Cheering himself up, he
says, it may abate, Jupiter is rising. Now, tell her, tell the queen …
He waits, his pen poised. No, that’s enough. Give it to me, Thomas, I will sign it.
He waits to see if the king will draw a heart. But the frivolities
of courtship are over. Marriage is a serious business. Henricus
Rex.
I think I have a stomach cramp, the king says. I think I have a
headache. I feel queasy, and there are black spots before my eyes,
that’s a sign, isn’t it?
If Your Majesty will rest a little, he says. And take courage.
You know what they say about the sweat. Merry at breakfast,
dead by dinner. But do you know it can kill you in two hours?
He says, I have heard that some people die of fear.
By afternoon the sun is struggling out. Henry, laughing, spurs
away his hunter under the dripping trees. At Smithfield Frith is
being shovelled up, his youth, his grace, his learning and his
beauty: a compaction of mud, grease, charred bone.
The king has two bodies. The first exists within the limits of
his physical being; you can measure it, and often Henry does, his
waist, his calf, his other parts. The second is his princely double,
free-floating, untethered, weightless, which may be in more than
one place at a time. Henry may be hunting in the forest, while his
princely double makes laws. One fights, one prays for peace.
One is wreathed in the mystery of his kingship: one is eating a
duckling with sweet green peas.
The Pope now says his marriage to Anne is void. He will
excommunicate him if he does not return to Katherine. Christendom will slough him off, body and soul, and his subjects will rise
up and eject him, into ignominy, exile; no Christian hearth will
shelter him, and when he dies his corpse will be dug with animal
bones into a common pit.
He has taught Henry to call the Pope ‘The Bishop of Rome’.
To laugh when his name is mentioned. If it is uncertain laughter,
it is better than his former genuflection.
Cranmer has invited the prophetess, Elizabeth Barton, to a
meeting at his house in Kent. She has seen a vision of Mary, the former princess, as queen? Yes. Of Gertrude, Lady Exeter, as
queen? Yes. He says gently, both cannot be true. The Maid says,
I only report what I see. He writes that she is bouncing and full
of confidence; she is used to dealing with archbishops, and she
takes him for another Warham, hanging on her every word.
She is a mouse under the cat’s paw.
Queen Katherine is on the move, her household much
reduced, to the Bishop of Lincoln’s palace at Buckden, an old
red-brick house with a great hall and gardens that run out into
copses and fields and so into the fenland landscape. September
will bring her the first fruits of autumn, as October will bring the
mists.
The king demands that Katherine give up for his coming child
the robes in which the child Mary was christened. When he hears
Katherine’s answer, he, Thomas Cromwell, laughs. Nature
wronged Katherine, he says, in not making her a man; she would
have surpassed all the heroes of antiquity. A paper is put before
her, in which she is addressed as ‘Princess Dowager’; shocked,
they show him how her pen has ripped through it, as she scores
out the new title.
Rumours crop in the short summer nights. Dawn finds them
like mushrooms in the damp grass. Members of Thomas
Cromwell’s household have been seeking a midwife in the small
hours of the morning. He is hiding a woman at some country
house of his, a foreign woman who has given him a daughter.
Whatever you do, he says to Rafe, don’t defend my honour. I
have women like that all over the place.
They will believe it, Rafe says. The word in the city is that
Thomas Cromwell has a prodigious …
Memory, he says. I have a very large ledger. A huge filing
system, in which are recorded (under their name, and also under
their offence) the details of people who have cut across me.
All the astrologers say that the king will have a son. But you
are better not to deal with these people. A man came to him, months ago, offering to make the king a philosopher’s stone, and
when he was told to make himself scarce he turned rude and
contrary, as these alchemists do, and now gives it out that the
king will die this year. Waiting in Saxony, he says, is the eldest
son of the late King Edward. You thought him a rattling skeleton
beneath the pavements of the Tower, only his murderers know
where: you are deceived, for he is a man grown, and ready to
claim his kingdom.
He counts it up: King Edward V, were he living, would be sixtyfour this November coming. He’s a bit late to the fight, he says.
He puts the alchemist in the Tower, to rethink his position.
No more from Paris. Whatever Maître Guido’s up to, he’s
very quiet about it.
Hans Holbein says, Thomas, I’ve got your hands done but I
haven’t paid much attention to your face. I promise this autumn
I’ll finish you off.
Suppose within every book there is another book, and within
every letter on every page another volume constantly unfolding;
but these volumes take no space on the desk. Suppose knowledge
could be reduced to a quintessence, held within a picture, a sign,
held within a place which is no place. Suppose the human skull
were to become capacious, spaces opening inside it, humming
chambers like beehives.
Lord Mountjoy, Katherine’s Chamberlain, has sent him a list
of all the necessities for the confinement of a Queen of England.
It amuses him, the smooth and civil handover; the court and its
ceremonies roll on, whoever the personnel, but it is clear Lord
Mountjoy takes him as the man in charge of everything now.
He goes down to Greenwich and refurbishes the apartments,
ready for Anne. Proclamations (undated) are prepared, to go out
to the people of England and the rulers of Europe, announcing
the birth of a prince. Just leave a little gap, he suggests, at the end
of ‘prince’, so if need be you can squash in … But they look at
him as if he’s a traitor, so he leaves off. When a woman withdraws to give birth the sun may be
shining but the shutters of her room are closed so she can make
her own weather. She is kept in the dark so she can dream. Her
dreams drift her far away, from terra firma to a marshy tract of
land, to a landing stage, to a river where a mist closes over the
further bank, and earth and sky are inseparate; there she must
embark towards life and death, a muffled figure in the stern
directing the oars. In this vessel prayers are said that men never
hear. Bargains are struck between a woman and her God. The
river is tidal, and between one feather-stroke and the next, her
tide may turn.
On 26 August 1533, a procession escorts the queen to her
sealed rooms at Greenwich. Her husband kisses her, adieu and
bon voyage, and she neither smiles nor speaks. She is very pale,
very grand, a tiny jewelled head balanced on the swaying tent of
her body, her steps small and circumspect, a prayer book in her
hands. On the quay she turns her head: one lingering glance. She
sees him; she sees the archbishop. One last look and then, her
women steadying her elbows, she puts her foot into the boat.

II
Devil’s Spit
Autumn and winter 1533

It is magnificent. At the moment of impact, the king’s eyes are
open, his body braced for the atteint; he takes the blow perfectly,
its force absorbed by a body securely armoured, moving in the
right direction, moving at the right speed. His colour does not
alter. His voice does not shake.
‘Healthy?’ he says. ‘Then I thank God for his favour to us. As
I thank you, my lords, for this comfortable intelligence.’
He thinks, Henry has been rehearsing. I suppose we all
have.
The king walks away towards his own rooms. Says over his
shoulder, ‘Call her Elizabeth. Cancel the jousts.’
A bleat from a Boleyn: ‘The other ceremonies as planned?’
No reply. Cranmer says, all as planned, till we hear different. I
am to stand godfather to the … the princess. He falters. He can
hardly believe it. For himself, he ordered a daughter, and he got a
daughter. His eyes follow Henry’s retreating back. ‘He did not
ask after the queen. He did not ask how she does.’
‘It hardly matters, does it?’ Edward Seymour, saying brutally
what everyone is thinking.
Then Henry, on his long solitary walk, stops, turns back. ‘My
lord archbishop. Cromwell. But you only.’
In Henry’s closet: ‘Had you imagined this? Some would smile. He does not. The king drops into a chair.
The urge arises to put a hand on his shoulder, as one does for any
inconsolable being. He resists it; simply folds his fingers, protectively, into the fist which holds the king’s heart. ‘One day we will
make a great marriage for her.’
‘Poor scrap. Her own mother will wish her away.’
‘Your Majesty is young enough,’ Cranmer says. ‘The queen is
strong and her family are fertile. You can get another child soon.
And perhaps God intends some peculiar blessing by this
princess.’
‘My dear friend, I am sure you are right.’ Henry sounds
dubious, but he looks around to take strength from his
surroundings, as if God might have left some friendly message
written on the wall: though there is only precedent for the hostile
kind. He takes a breath and stands up and shakes out his sleeves.
He smiles: and one can catch in flight, as if it were a bird with a
strong-beating heart, the act of will that transforms a desolate
wretch into the beacon of his nation.
He whispers to Cranmer later, ‘It was like watching Lazarus
get up.’
Soon Henry is striding about the palace at Greenwich, putting
the celebrations under way. We are young enough, he says, and
next time it will be a boy. One day we will make a great marriage
for her. Believe me, God intends some peculiar blessing by this
princess.
Boleyn faces brighten. It’s Sunday, four in the afternoon. He
goes and laughs a bit at the clerks who have ‘prince’ written on
their proclamations, and who now have to squeeze extra letters
in, then he goes back to working out the expenses for the new
princess’s household. He has advised that Gertrude, Lady Exeter,
be among the child’s godparents. Why should only the Maid
have a vision of her? It will do her good to be seen by the whole
court, smiling a forced smile and holding Anne’s baby at the font. The Maid herself, brought to London, is kept in a private house,
where the beds are soft and the voices around her, the voices of
Cromwell women, hardly disturb her prayers; where the key is
turned in the oiled lock with a click as small as the snap of a bird’s
bone. ‘Does she eat?’ he asks Mercy, and she says, she eats as
heartily as you: well, no, Thomas, perhaps not quite so heartily
as you.
‘I wonder what happened to her project of living on the
Communion host?’
‘They can’t see her dining now, can they? Those priests and
monks who set her on this course.’
Away from their scrutiny, the nun has started to act like an
ordinary woman, acknowledging the simple claims of her body,
like anyone who wants to live; but it may be too late. He likes it
that Mercy doesn’t say, ahh, the poor harmless soul. That she is
not harmless by nature is clear when they have her over to
Lambeth Palace to question her. You would think Lord Chancellor Audley, his chain of office hung about his splendid
person, would be enough to subdue any country girl. Throw in
the Archbishop of Canterbury, and you would imagine a young
nun might feel some awe. Not a bit of it. The Maid treats
Cranmer with condescension – as if he were a novice in the religious life. When he challenges her on any point and says, ‘How
do you know that?’ she smiles pityingly and says, ‘An angel told
me.’
Audley brings Richard Riche with him to their second session,
to take notes for them, and put any points that occur to him. He
is Sir Richard now, knighted and promoted to Solicitor General.
In his student days he was known for a sharp slanderous tongue,
for irreverence to his seniors, for drinking and gaming for high
stakes. But who would hold up his head, if people judged us by
what we were like at twenty? Riche turns out to have a talent for
drafting legislation which is second only to his own. His
features, beneath his soft fair hair, are pinched with concentra tion; the boys call him Sir Purse. You’d never think, to see him
precisely laying out his papers, that he was once the great
disgrace of the Inner Temple. He says so, in an undertone,
teasing him, while they wait for the girl to be brought in. Well,
Master Cromwell! Riche says; what about you and that abbess in
Halifax?
He knows better than to deny it: or any of those stories the
cardinal told about him. ‘Oh, that,’ he says. ‘It was nothing –
they expect it in Yorkshire.’
He is afraid the girl may have caught the tail end of the
exchange, because today, as she takes the chair they have placed
for her, she gives him a particularly hard stare. She arranges her
skirts, folds her arms and waits for them to entertain her. His
niece Alice Wellyfed sits on a stool by the door: just there in case
of fainting, or other upset. Though a glance at the Maid tells you
she is no more likely to faint than Audley is.
‘Shall I?’ Riche says. ‘Start?’
‘Oh, why not?’ Audley says. ‘You are young and hearty.’
‘These prophecies of yours – you are always changing the
timing of the disaster you foresee, but I understood you said that
the king would not reign one month after he married Lady Anne.
Well, the months have passed, Lady Anne is crowned queen, and
has given the king a fine daughter. So what do you say now?’
‘I say in the eyes of the world he seems to be king. But in the
eyes of God,’ she shrugs, ‘not any more. He is no more the real
king than he,’ she nods towards Cranmer, ‘is really archbishop.’
Riche is not to be sidetracked. ‘So it would be justified to raise
rebellion against him? To depose him? To assassinate him? To
put another in his place?’
‘Well, what do you think?’
‘And among the claimants your choice has fallen on the
Courtenay family, not the Poles. Henry, Marquis of Exeter. Not
Henry, Lord Montague.’
‘Or,’ he says sympathetically, ‘do you get them mixed up?’ ‘Of course not.’ She flushes. ‘I have met both those gentlemen.’
Riche makes a note.
Audley says, ‘Now Courtenay, that is Lord Exeter, descends
from a daughter of King Edward. Lord Montague descends from
King Edward’s brother, the Duke of Clarence. How do you
weigh their claims? Because if we are talking of true kings and
false kings, some say Edward was a bastard his mother got by an
archer. I wonder if you can cast any light?’
‘Why would she?’ Riche says.
Audley rolls his eyes. ‘Because she talks to the saints on high.
They’d know.’
He looks at Riche and it is as if he can read his thoughts:
Niccolò’s book says, the wise prince exterminates the envious,
and if I, Riche, were king, those claimants and their families
would be dead. The girl is braced for the next question: how is
it she has seen two queens in her vision? ‘I suppose it will sort
itself out,’ he says, ‘in the fighting? It’s good to have a few kings
and queens in reserve, if you’re going to start a war in a
country.’
‘It is not necessary to have a war,’ the nun says. Oh? Sir Purse
sits up: this is new. ‘God is sending a plague on England instead.
Henry will be dead in six months. So will she, Thomas Boleyn’s
daughter.’
‘And me?’
‘You too.’
‘And all in this room? Except you, of course? All including
Alice Wellyfed, who never did you harm?’
‘All the women of your house are heretics, and the plague will
rot them body and soul.’
‘And what about the princess Elizabeth?’
She turns in her seat, to aim her words at Cranmer. ‘They say
when you christened her you warmed the water to spare her a
shock. You should have poured it boiling. Oh, Christ in Heaven, Riche says. He throws his pen down.
He is a tender young father, with a daughter in the cradle.
He drops a consoling hand on his, the Solicitor General’s. You
would think Alice would need consoling; but when the Maid
condemned her to death, he had looked down the room at his
niece to note that her face was the perfect picture of derision. He
says to Riche, ‘She didn’t think it up herself, the boiling water. It
is a thing they are saying on the streets.’
Cranmer huddles into himself; the Maid has bruised him, she
has scored a point. He, Cromwell, says, ‘I saw the princess
yesterday. She is thriving, in spite of her ill-wishers.’ His voice
suggests calm: we must get the archbishop back in the saddle. He
turns to the Maid: ‘Tell me: did you locate the cardinal?’
‘What?’ Audley says.
‘Dame Elizabeth said she would look out for my old master,
on one of her excursions to Heaven, Hell and Purgatory, and I
offered to pay her travelling expenses on the occasion. I gave her
people a down-payment – I hope we see some progress?’
‘Wolsey would have had another fifteen years of life,’ the girl
says. He nods: he has said the same himself. ‘But then God
cut him off, as an example. I have seen devils disputing for his
soul.’
‘You know the result?’ he asks.
‘There is no result. I searched for him all over. I thought God
had extinguished him. Then one night I saw him.’ A long, tactical hesitation. ‘I saw his soul seated among the unborn.’
There is a silence. Cranmer shrinks in his seat. Riche gently
nibbles the end of his pen. Audley twists a button on his sleeve,
round and round till the thread tightens.
‘If you like I can pray for him,’ the Maid says. ‘God usually
answers my requests.’
‘Formerly, when you had your advisers about you, Father
Bocking and Father Gold and Father Risby and the rest, you
would start bargaining at this point. I would propose a further sum for your goodwill, and your spiritual directors would drive
it up.’
‘Wait.’ Cranmer lays a hand over his ribcage. ‘Can we go
back? Lord Chancellor?’
‘We can go in any direction you choose, my lord archbishop.
Three times round the mulberry bush …’
‘You see devils?’
She nods.
‘They appear how?’
‘Birds.’
‘A relief,’ Audley says drily.
‘No, sir. Lucifer stinks. His claws are deformed. He comes as
a cockerel smeared in blood and shit.’
He looks up at Alice. He is ready to send her out. He thinks,
what has been done to this woman?
Cranmer says, ‘That must be disagreeable for you. But it is a
characteristic of devils, I understand, to show themselves in more
than one way.’
‘Yes. They do it to deceive you. He comes as a young man.’
‘Indeed?’
‘Once he brought a woman. To my cell at night.’ She pauses.
‘Pawing her.’
Riche: ‘He is known to have no shame.’
‘No more than you.’
‘And what then, Dame Elizabeth? After the pawing?’
‘Pulled up her skirts.’
‘And she didn’t resist?’ Riche says. ‘You surprise me.’
Audley says, ‘Prince Lucifer, I don’t doubt he has a way with him.’
‘Before my eyes, he had to do with her, on my bed.’
Riche makes a note. ‘This woman, did you know her?’ No
answer. ‘And the devil did not try the same with you? You can
speak freely. It will not be held against you.’
‘He came to sweet-talk me. Swaggering in his blue silk coat,
it’s the best he has. And new hose with diamonds down his legs.’ ‘Diamonds down his legs,’ he says. ‘Now that must have been
a temptation?’
She shakes her head.
‘But you are a fine young woman – good enough for any man,
I’d say.’
She looks up; a flicker of a smile. ‘I am not for Master Lucifer.’
‘What did he say when you refused him?’
‘He asked me to marry him.’ Audley puts his head in his
hands. ‘I said I was vowed to chastity.’
‘Was he not angry when you would not consent?’
‘Oh yes. He spat in my face.’
‘I would expect no better of him,’ Riche says.
‘I wiped his spit off with a napkin. It’s black. It has the stench
of Hell.’
‘What is that like?’
‘Like something rotting.’
‘Where is it now, the napkin? I suppose you didn’t send it to
the laundry?’
‘Dom Edward has it.’
‘Does he show it to people? For money?’
‘For offerings.’
‘For money.’
Cranmer takes his face from his hands. ‘Shall we pause?’
‘A quarter hour?’ Riche says.
Audley: ‘I told you he was young and hearty.’
‘Perhaps we will meet tomorrow,’ Cranmer says. ‘I need to
pray. And a quarter of an hour will not do it.’
‘But tomorrow is Sunday,’ the nun says. ‘There was a man
who went out hunting on a Sunday and he fell down a bottomless pit into Hell. Imagine that.’
‘How was it bottomless,’ Riche asks, ‘if Hell was there to
receive him?’
‘I wish I were going hunting,’ Audley says. ‘Christ knows, I’d
take a chance on it.

Alice rises from her stool and signals for her escort. The Maidgets to her feet. She is smiling broadly. She has made the archbishop flinch, and himself grow cold, and the Solicitor Generalall but weep with her talk of scalded babies. She thinks she iswinning; but she is losing, losing, losing all the time. Alice puts agentle hand on her arm, but the Maid shakes it off.Outside, Richard Riche says, ‘We should burn her.’Cranmer says, ‘Much as we may mislike her talk of the latecardinal appearing to her, and devils in her bedchamber, shespeaks in this way because she has been taught to ape the claimsof certain nuns who have gone before her, nuns whom Rome ispleased to recognise as saints. I cannot convict them of heresy,retrospectively. Nor have I evidence to try her for heresy.’‘Burned for treason, I meant.’It is the woman’s penalty; where a man is half-hanged andcastrated, then slowly gutted by the executioner.He says, ‘There is no overt action. She has only expressed anintent.’‘Intent to raise rebellion, to depose the king, should that notbe treason? Words have been construed as treasons, there areprecedents, you know them.’‘I should be astonished,’ Audley says, ‘if they have escapedCromwell’s attention.’It is as if they can smell the devil’s spit; they are almost jostlingeach other to get into the air, which is mild, damp: a faint scent ofleaves, a green-gold, rustling light. He can see that, in the yearsahead, treason will take new and various forms. When the lasttreason act was made, no one could circulate their words in aprinted book or bill, because printed books were not thought of.He feels a moment of jealousy towards the dead, to those whoserved kings in slower times than these; nowadays the productsof some bought or poisoned brain can be disseminated throughEurope in a month.‘I think new laws are needed,’ Riche says . ‘I have it in hand.’‘And I think this woman is too leniently kept. We are too soft.We are just playing with her.’Cranmer walks away, shoulders stooped, his trailing habitbrushing up the leaves. Audley turns to him, bright and resolute,a man keen to change the subject. ‘So, the princess, you say shewas well?’The princess, unswaddled, had been placed on cushions atAnne’s feet: an ugly, purple, grizzling knot of womankind, withan upstanding ruff of pale hair and a habit of kicking up hergown as if to display her most unfortunate feature. It seemsstories have been put about that Anne’s child was born withteeth, has six fingers on each hand, and is furred all over like amonkey, so her father has shown her off naked to the ambassadors, and her mother is keeping her on display in the hope ofcountering the rumours. The king has chosen Hatfield for herseat, and Anne says, ‘It seems to me waste might be saved, andthe proper order of things asserted, if Spanish Mary’s householdwere broken up and she were to become a member of the household of the princess Elizabeth my daughter.’‘In the capacity of …?’ The child is quiet; only, he notes, becauseshe has crammed a fist into her maw, and is cannibalising herself.‘In the capacity of my daughter’s servant. What else should shebe? There can be no pretence at equality. Mary is a bastard.’The brief respite is over; the princess sets up a screech thatwould bring out the dead. Anne’s glance slides away sideways,and a sideways grin of infatuation takes over her whole face, andshe leans down towards her daughter, but at once women swoop,flapping and bustling; the screaming creature is plucked up,wrapped up, swept away, and the queen’s eyes follow pitifully asthe fruit of her womb exits, in procession. He says gently, ‘Ithink she was hungry. Saturday evening: supper at Austin Friars for Stephen Vaughan,so often in transit: William Butts, Hans, Kratzer, Call-Me Risley.Conversation is in various tongues and Rafe Sadler translatesadroitly, smoothly, his head turning from side to side: high topicsand low, statecraft and gossip, Zwingli’s theology, Cranmer’swife. About the latter, it has not been possible to suppress thetalk at the Steelyard and in the city; Vaughan says, ‘Can Henryknow and not know?’‘That is perfectly possible. He is a prince of very large capacities.’Larger by the day, Wriothesley says, laughing; Dr Butts says,he is one of those men who must be active, and recently his leg istroubling him, that old injury; but think, is it likely that a manwho has not spared himself on the hunting field and in the tiltyard should not get some injury by the time he is the king’s age?He is forty-three this year, you know, and I should be glad,Kratzer, to have your view on what the planets suggest, for thelater years of a man whose chart is so dominated by air and fire;by the by, did I not always warn of his moon in Aries (rash andhasty planet) in the house of marriage?He says, impatient, we heard very little about the Aries moonwhen he was settled with Katherine for twenty years. It is not thestars that make us, Dr Butts, it is circumstance and necessità, thechoices we make under pressure; our virtues make us, but virtuesare not enough, we must deploy our vices at times. Or don’t youagree?He beckons to Christophe to fill their glasses. They talk aboutthe Mint, where Vaughan is to have a position; about Calais, whereHonor Lisle seems more busy in affairs than her husband theGovernor. He thinks about Guido Camillo in Paris, pacing andfretting between the wooden walls of his memory machine, whileknowledge grows unseen and of itself in its cavities and concealedinner spaces. He thinks of the Holy Maid – by now established asnot holy, and not a maid – no doubt at this moment sitting down to supper with his nieces. He thinks of his fellow interrogators:Cranmer on his knees in prayer, Sir Purse frowning over the day’stranscripts, Audley – what will the Lord Chancellor be doing?Polishing his chain of office, he decides. He thinks of saying toVaughan, below the conversation, was there not a girl in yourhouse called Jenneke? What happened to her? But Wriothesleybreaks in on his train of thought. ‘When shall we see my master’sportrait? You have been at work on it a while, Hans, it is time itcame home. We are keen to see what you have made of him.’‘He is still busy with the French envoys,’ Kratzer says. ‘DeDinteville wants to take his picture home with him when he getshis recall …’There is some laughter at the expense of the French ambassador, always doing his packing and having to undo it again, as hismaster commands him to stay where he is. ‘Anyway, I hope hedoes not take it too quick,’ Hans says, ‘because I mean to show itand get commissions off it. I want the king to see it, indeed Iwant to paint the king, do you think I can?’‘I will ask him,’ he says easily. ‘Let me choose the time.’ Helooks down the table to see Vaughan glow with pride, like Jupiteron a painted ceiling.After they get up from the table his guests eat ginger comfitsand candied fruits, and Kratzer makes some drawings. He drawsthe sun and the planets moving in their orbits according to theplan he has heard of from Father Copernicus. He shows how theworld is turning on its axis, and nobody in the room denies it.Under your feet you can feel the tug and heft of it, the rocksgroaning to tear away from their beds, the oceans tilting andslapping at their shores, the giddy lurch of Alpine passes, theforests of Germany ripping at their roots to be free. The world isnot what it was when he and Vaughan were young, it is not whatit was even in the cardinal’s day.The company has left when his niece Alice comes in, past hiswatchmen, wrapped up in a cloak; she is escorted by Thomas Rotherham, one of his wards who lives in the house. ‘Never fear,sir,’ she says, ‘Jo is sitting up with Dame Elizabeth, and nothinggets by Jo.’Does it not? That child perpetually in tears over her spoiledsewing? That grubby little girl sometimes found rolling under atable with a wet dog, or chasing a peddler down the street? ‘Iwould like to talk to you,’ Alice says, ‘if you have time for me?’ Ofcourse, he says, taking her arm, folding her hand in his; ThomasRotherham turns pale – which puzzles him – and slides away.Alice sits down in his office. She yawns. ‘Excuse me – but sheis hard work and the hours are long.’ She tucks a strand of hairinto her hood. ‘She is ready to break,’ she says. ‘She is brave toyour faces, but she cries at night, because she knows she is afraud. And even while she is crying, she peeps under her eyelidsto see what effect she is making.’‘I want it over with now,’ he says. ‘For all the trouble she hascaused, we do not find ourselves an edifying spectacle, three orfour of us learned in the law and the scriptures, convening dayafter day to try to trip one chit of a girl.’‘Why did you not bring her in before?’‘I didn’t want her to shut the prophecy shop. I wanted to seewho would come to her whistle. And Lady Exeter has, andBishop Fisher. And a score of monks and foolish priests whosenames I know, and a hundred perhaps whose names I don’tknow yet.’‘And will the king kill them all?’‘Very few, I hope.’‘You incline him to mercy?’‘I incline him to patience.’‘What will happen to her? Dame Eliza?’‘We will frame charges.’‘She will not go in a dungeon?’‘No, I shall move the king to treat her with consideration, heis always – he is usually – respectful of any person in the religious life. But Alice,’ he sees that she is dissolving into tears, ‘I thinkthis has all been too much for you.’‘No, not at all. We are soldiers in your army.’‘She has not been frightening you, talking about the devil’swicked offers?’‘No, it’s Thomas Rotherham’s offers … he wants to marryme.’‘So that’s what’s wrong with him!’ He is amused. ‘Could henot ask himself?’‘He thought you would look at him in that way you have …as if you were weighing him.’Like a clipped coin? ‘Alice, he owns a fat slice of Bedfordshire,and his manors prosper very nicely since I have been looking afterthem. And if you like each other, how could I object? You are aclever girl, Alice. Your mother,’ he says softly, ‘and your father,they would be very pleased with you, if they were able to see.’This is why Alice is crying. She must ask her uncle’s permission because this last year has left her orphaned. The day hissister Bet died, he was up-country with the king. Henry wasreceiving no messengers from London for fear of contagion, soshe was dead and buried before he knew she was ill. When thenews crept through at last, the king spoke to him with tenderness, a hand on his arm; he spoke of his own sister, the silverhaired lady like a princess in a book, removed from this life togardens of Paradise, he had claimed, reserved for royal dead; forit is impossible, he had said, to think of that lady in any lowplace, any place of darkness, the barred charnel house of Purgatory with its flying cinders and sulphur reek, its boiling tar androiling clouds of sleet.‘Alice,’ he says, ‘dry your tears, find Thomas Rotherham, andend his pain. You need not come to Lambeth tomorrow. Jo cancome, if she is as formidable as you say.’Alice turns in the doorway. ‘I will see her again, though? ElizaBarton? I should like to see her before …Before they kill her. Alice is no innocent in this world. Just aswell. Look how the innocent end; used by the sin-sodden and thecynical, pulped to their purpose and ground under their heels.He hears Alice running upstairs. He hears her calling,Thomas, Thomas … It is a name that will bring half the houseout, tumbling from their bedside prayers, from their very beds:yes, are you looking for me? He pulls his furred gown aroundhim and goes outside to look at the stars. The precincts of hishouse are kept well lit; the gardens by torchlight are the site ofexcavations, trenches dug out for foundations, earth banked upinto barrows and mounds. The vast timber frame of a new wingjuts against the sky; in the middle distance, his new planting, acity orchard where Gregory, one day, will pick the fruit, andAlice, and Alice’s sons. He has fruit trees already, but he wantscherries and plums like the ones he has eaten abroad, and latepears to use in the Tuscan fashion, to match their crisp metallicflesh with winter’s salt cod. Then next year he means to makeanother garden at the hunting lodge he has at Canonbury, makeit a retreat from the city, a summer house in the fields. He haswork in hand at Stepney too, expansion; John Williamson islooking after the builders for him. Strange, but like a miracle thefamily’s prosperity seems to have cured him of his killing cough.I like John Williamson, he thinks, why ever did I, with his wife… Beyond the gate, cries and shouts, London never still or quiet;so many in the graveyards, but the living parading in the streets,drunken fighters pitching from London Bridge, sanctuary menstealing out to thieve, Southwark whores bawling out their priceslike butchers selling dead flesh.He goes inside. His desk draws him back. In a small chest hekeeps his wife’s book, her book of hours. Inside it are prayers onloose papers which she has inserted. Say the name of Christ athousand times and it keeps fever away. But it doesn’t, does it?The fever comes anyway and kills you. Beside the name of herfirst husband, Thomas Williams, she has written his own name, but she never, he notices, crossed Tom Williams out. She hasrecorded the births of her children, and he has written in besidethem the dates of his daughters’ deaths. He finds a space wherehe will note the marriages of his sisters’ children: Richard toFrances Murfyn, Alice to his ward.He thinks, perhaps I have got over Liz. It didn’t seem possiblethat weight would ever shift from inside his chest, but it haslightened enough to let him get on with his life. I could marryagain, he thinks, but is this not what people are always tellingme? He says to himself, I never think of Johane Williamson now:not Johane as she was for me. Her body once had specialmeaning, but that meaning is now unmade; the flesh createdbeneath his fingertips, hallowed by desire, becomes just the ordinary substance of a city wife, a fading woman with no particularlooks. He says to himself, I never think of Anselma now; she isjust the woman in the tapestry, the woman in the weave.He reaches for his pen. I have got over Liz, he says to himself.Surely? He hesitates, the quill in his hand, weighted by ink. Heholds the pages down flat, and strikes out the name of her firsthusband. He thinks, I’ve meant to do that for years.It is late. Upstairs he closes the shutter, where the moon gapesin hollow-eyed, like a drunk lost in the street. Christophe,folding garments, says, ‘Is there loups? In this kingdom?’‘I think the wolves all died when the great forests were cutdown. That howling you hear is only the Londoners.’Sunday: in rose-tinted light they set out from Austin Friars, hismen in their new livery of grey marbled cloth collecting the partyfrom the city house where the nun has been held. It would beconvenient, he thinks, if I had Master Secretary’s barge, insteadof making ad hoc arrangements when we have to cross the river.He has already heard Mass; Cranmer insists they all hear another.He watches the girl and sees her tears flow. Alice is right; she is atthe end of her invention. By nine o’clock she is unwinding the threads she has spentyears ravelling up. She confesses in style, so hard and fast thatRiche can hardly keep track, and she appeals to them as men ofthe world, as people with their way to make: ‘You know how itis. You mention something and people are at you, what do youmean, what do you mean? You say you’ve had a vision and theywon’t leave you alone.’‘You can’t disappoint people?’ he says; she agrees, that’s it,you can’t. Once you start you have to keep going. If you try togo back they’ll slaughter you.She confesses that her visions are inventions. She never spoketo heavenly persons. Or raised the dead; that was all a fraud. Shenever had a hand in miracles. The letter from Mary Magdalene,Father Bocking wrote it, and a monk put gilding on the letters, ina minute she’ll think of his name. The angels came out of her owninvention, she seemed to see them but she knows now that theywere just flashes of light against the wall. The voices she heardwere not their voices, they were not distinct voices at all, just thesounds of her sisters singing in the chapel, or a woman in theroad crying because she has been beaten and robbed, or perhapsthe meaningless clatter of dishes from the kitchen; and thosegroans and cries, that seemed to come from the throats of thedamned, it was someone above scraping a trestle across the floor,it was the whimper of a lost dog. 

I know now, sirs, that thosesaints were not real. Not in the way you are real.’Something has broken inside her, and he wonders what thatthing is.She says, ‘Is there any chance I could go home again to Kent?’‘I’ll see what can be arranged.’Hugh Latimer is sitting with them, and he gives him a hard look,as if he’s making false promises. No, really, he says. Leave it with me.Cranmer tells her gently, ‘Before you can go anywhere, it willbe necessary for you to make public acknowledgement of yourimposture. Public confession.’ She’s not shy of crowds, are you?’ These many years she’sbeen on the road, a travelling show, and will be again, thoughnow the nature of the show has changed; he means to display her,repentant, at Paul’s Cross, and perhaps outside London too. Hefeels that she will take to the role of fraud, with the same relishwith which she took to her role as saint.He says to Riche, Niccolò tells us unarmed prophets alwaysfail. He smiles and says, I mention this, Ricardo, because I knowyou like to have it by the book.Cranmer leans forward and says to the Maid, these men aboutyou, Edward Bocking and the rest, which of them were yourlovers?She is shocked: perhaps because the question has come fromhim, the sweetest of her interrogators. She just stares at him, as ifone of them were stupid.He says, murmuring, she may think lovers is not the word.Enough. To Audley, to Latimer, to Riche, he says, ‘I shallbegin bringing in her followers, and her leaders. She has ruinedmany, if we care to press for their ruin. Fisher certainly, MargaretPole perhaps, Gertrude and her husband for sure. Lady Mary theking’s daughter, quite possibly. Thomas More no, Katherine no,but a fat haul of Franciscans.’The court rises, if court is what you call it. Jo stands up. Shehas been sewing – or rather, unsewing, teasing out the pomegranate border from a crewel-work panel – these remnants of Katherine, of the dusty kingdom of Granada, linger in England still. Shefolds her work, dropping her scissors into her pocket, pinchingup her sleeve and feeding her needle into the fabric for later use.She walks up to the prisoner and puts a hand on her arm. ‘Wemust say adieu.’‘William Hawkhurst,’ the girl says, ‘I remember the namenow. The monk who gilded the letter from Mary Magdalene.’Richard Riche makes a note.‘Do not say any more today,’ Jo advises. ‘Will you come with me, mistress? Where I am going?’‘Nobody will come with you,’ Jo says. ‘I do not think youhave the sense of it, Dame Eliza. You are going to the Tower, andI am going home to my dinner.’This summer of 1533 has been a summer of cloudless days, ofstrawberry feasts in London gardens, the drone of fumblingbees, warm evenings to stroll under rose arbours and hear fromthe allées the sound of young gentlemen quarrelling over theirbowls. The grain harvest is abundant even in the north. The treesare bowed under the weight of ripening fruit. As if he hasdecreed that the heat must continue, the king’s court burnsbright through the autumn. Monseigneur the queen’s fathershines like the sun, and around him spins a smaller but stillblazing noonday planet, his son George Rochford. But it isBrandon who leads the dancing, galloping through the hallstowing his new bride, whose age is fourteen. She is an heiress,and was betrothed to his son, but Charles thought an experienced man like him could turn her to better use.The Seymours have put their family scandal behind them, andtheir fortunes are mending. Jane Seymour says to him, looking ather feet, ‘Master Cromwell, my brother Edward smiled lastweek.’‘That was rash of him, what made him do so?’‘He heard his wife is sick. The wife he used to have. The onethat my father, you know.’‘Is she likely to die?’‘Oh, very likely. Then he will get a new one. But he will keepher at his house in Elvetham, and never let her come within amile of Wolf Hall. And when my father visits Elvetham, she willbe locked in the linen room till he has gone again.’Jane’s sister Lizzie is at court with her husband, the Governorof Jersey, who is some connection of the new queen’s. Lizziecomes packaged into her velvet and lace, her outlines as firm as her sister’s are indefinite and blurred, her eyes bold and hazel andeloquent. Jane whispers in her wake; her eyes are the colour ofwater, where her thoughts slip past, like gilded fishes too smallfor hook or net.It is Jane Rochford – whose mind, in his view, is underoccupied – who sees him watching the sisters. ‘Lizzie Seymour musthave a lover,’ she says, ‘it cannot be her husband who puts thatglow in her cheeks, he is an old man. He was old when he was inthe Scots wars.’ The two sisters are just a little alike, she pointsout; they have the same habit of dipping their head and drawingin their underlip. ‘Otherwise,’ she says, smirking, ‘you wouldthink their mother had been up to the same tricks as her husband.She was a beauty in her day, you know, Margery Wentworth.And nobody knows what goes on down in Wiltshire.’‘I’m surprised you don’t, Lady Rochford. You seem to knoweveryone’s business.’‘You and me, we keep our eyes open.’ She lowers her head,and says, as if directing the words inward, to her own body, ‘Icould keep my eyes open, if you like, in places you cannot go.’Dear God, what does she want? It can’t be money, surely? Thequestion comes out colder than he means: ‘Upon what possibleinducement?’She lifts her eyes to his. ‘I should like your friendship.’‘No conditions attach to that.’‘I thought I might help you. Because your ally Lady Carey hasgone down to Hever now to see her daughter. She is no longerwanted since Anne is back on duty in the bedchamber. PoorMary.’ She laughs. ‘God dealt her a good enough hand but shenever knew how to play it. Tell me, what will you do if the queendoes not have another child?’‘There is no reason to fear it. Her mother had a child a year.Boleyn used to complain it kept him poor.’‘Have you ever observed that when a man gets a son he takesall the credit, and when he gets a daughter he blames his wife? And if they do not breed at all, we say it is because her womb isbarren. We do not say it is because his seed is bad.’‘It’s the same in the gospels. The stony ground gets the blame.’The stony places, the thorny unprofitable waste. JaneRochford is childless after seven years of marriage. ‘I believe myhusband wishes I would die.’ She says it lightly. He does notknow how to answer. He has not asked for her confidence. ‘If Ido die,’ she says, in the same bright tone, ‘have my body opened.I ask you this in friendship. I am afraid of poison. My husbandand his sister are closeted together for hours, and Anne knows allmanner of poisons. She has boasted that she will give Mary abreakfast she will not recover from.’ He waits. ‘Mary the king’sdaughter, I mean. Though I am sure if it pleased Anne she wouldnot scruple to make away with her own sister.’ She glances upagain. ‘In your heart, if you are honest, you would like to knowthe things I know.’She is lonely, he thinks, and breeding a savage heart, like Leontina in her cage. She imagines everything is about her, everyglance or secret conversation. She is afraid the other women pityher, and she hates to be pitied. He says, ‘What do you know ofmy heart?’‘I know where you have disposed it.’‘It is more than I know myself.’‘That is not uncommon among men. I can tell you who youlove. Why do you not ask for her, if you want her? TheSeymours are not rich. They will sell you Jane, and be glad of thebargain.’‘You are mistaken in the nature of my interest. I have younggentlemen in my house, I have wards, their marriages are mybusiness.’‘Oh, fal la la,’ she says. ‘Sing another song. Tell it to infants inthe nursery. Tell it to the House of Commons, you do mostusually lie to them. But do not think you can deceive me.’‘For a lady who offers friendship, you have rough manners.’ ‘Get used to them, if you want my information. You go intoAnne’s rooms now, and what do you see? The queen at her priedieu. The queen sewing a smock for a beggar woman, wearingpearls the size of chickpeas.’It is hard not to smile. The portrait is exact. Anne has Cranmerentranced. He thinks her the pattern of pious womanhood.‘So do you imagine that is what is really going on? Do youimagine she has given up communing with nimble young gentlemen? Riddles and verses and songs in praise of her, do yousuppose she has given them up?’‘She has the king to praise her.’‘Not a good word will she hear from that quarter till her bellyis big again.’‘And what will hinder that?’‘Nothing. If he is up to it.’‘Be careful.’ He smiles.‘I never knew it was treason to say what passes in a prince’sbed. All Europe talked about Katherine, what body part was putwhere, was she penetrated, and if she was did she know?’ Shesniggers. ‘Harry’s leg pains him at night. He is afraid the queenwill kick him in the throes of her passion.’ She puts her handbefore her mouth, but the words creep out, narrow between herfingers. ‘But if she lies still under him he says, what, madam, areyou so little interested in making my heir?’‘I do not see what she is to do.’‘She says she gets no pleasure with him. And he – as he foughtseven years to get her, he can hardly admit it has staled so soon.It was stale before they came from Calais, that is what I think.’It’s possible; maybe they were battle-weary, exhausted. Yet hegives her such magnificent presents. And they quarrel so much.Would they quarrel so much, if they were indifferent?‘So,’ she goes on, ‘between the kicking and the sore leg, and hislack of prowess, and her lack of desire, it will be a wonder if weever have a Prince of Wales. Oh, he is good man enough, if he had a new woman each week. If he craves novelty, who is to say shedoes not? Her own brother is in her service.’He turns to look at her. ‘God help you, Lady Rochford,’ hesays.‘To fetch his friends her way, I mean. What did you think Imeant?’ A little, grating laugh.‘Do you know what you mean yourself? You have been atcourt long enough, you know what games are played. It is nomatter if any lady receives verses and compliments, even thoughshe is married. She knows her husband writes verses elsewhere.’‘Oh, she knows that. At least, I know. There is not a minxwithin thirty miles who has not had a set of Rochford’s verses.But if you think the gallantry stops at the bedchamber’s door,you are more innocent than I took you for. You may be in lovewith Seymour’s daughter, but you need not emulate her in havingthe wit of a sheep.’He smiles. ‘Sheep are maligned in that way. Shepherds saythey can recognise each other. They answer to their names. Theymake friends for life.’‘And I will tell you who is in and out of everyone’s bedchamber, it is that sneaking little boy Mark. He is the go-between forthem all. My husband pays him in pearl buttons and comfitboxes and feathers for his hat.’‘Why, is Lord Rochford short of ready money?’‘You see an opportunity for usury?’‘How not?’ At least, he thinks, there is one point on which weconcur: pointless dislike of Mark. In Wolsey’s house he hadduties, teaching the choir children. Here he does nothing butstand about, wherever the court is, in greater or lesser proximityto the queen’s apartments. ‘Well, I can see no harm in the boy,’ hesays.‘He sticks like a burr to his betters. He does not know hisplace. He is a jumped-up nobody, taking his chance because thetimes are disordered.’ ‘I suppose you could say the same of me, Lady Rochford. And
I am sure you do.’
Thomas Wyatt brings him baskets of cobnuts and filberts,
bushels of Kentish apples, jolting up himself to Austin Friars
on the carrier’s cart. ‘The venison follows,’ he says, jumping
down. ‘I come with the fresh fruit, not the carcases.’ His hair
smells of apples, his clothes are dusty from the road. ‘Now you
will have words with me,’ he says, ‘for risking a doublet worth
–’
‘The carrier’s yearly earnings.’
Wyatt looks chastened. ‘I forget you are my father.’
‘I have rebuked you, so now we can fall to idle boyish talk.’
Standing in a wash of chary autumn sun, he holds an apple in his
hand. He pares it with a thin blade, and the peel whispers away
from the flesh and lies among his papers, like the shadow of an
apple, green on white paper and black ink. ‘Did you see Lady
Carey when you were in the country?’
‘Mary Boleyn in the country. What dew-fresh pleasures spring
to mind. I expect she’s rutting in some hayloft.’
‘Just that I want to keep hold of her, for the next time her sister
is hors de combat.’
Wyatt sits down amid the files, an apple in his hand.
‘Cromwell, suppose you’d been away from England for seven
years? If you’d been like a knight in a story, lying under an
enchantment? You would look around you and wonder, who are
they, these people?’
This summer, Wyatt vowed, he would stay down in Kent. He
would read and write on wet days, hunt when it is fine. But the
fall comes, and the nights deepen, and Anne draws him back and
back. His heart is true, he believes: and if she is false, it is difficult
to pick where the falsehood lies. You cannot joke with Anne
these days. You cannot laugh. You must think her perfect, or she
will find some way to punish you. ‘My old father talks about King Edward’s days. He says, you
see now why it’s not good for the king to marry a subject, an
Englishwoman?’
The trouble is, though Anne has remade the court, there are
still people who knew her before, in the days when she came
from France, when she set herself to seduce Harry Percy. They
compete to tell stories of how she is not worthy. Or not human.
How she is a snake. Or a swan. Una candida cerva. One single
white doe, concealed in leaves of silver-grey; shivering, she hides
in the trees, waiting for the lover who will turn her back from
animal to goddess. ‘Send me back to Italy,’ Wyatt says. Her dark,
her lustrous, her slanting eyes: she haunts me. She comes to me in
my solitary bed at night.
‘Solitary? I don’t think so.’
Wyatt laughs. ‘You’re right. I take it where I can.’
‘You drink too much. Water your wine.’
‘It could have been different.’
‘Everything could.’
‘You never think about the past.’
‘I never talk about it.’
Wyatt pleads, ‘Send me away somewhere.’
‘I will. When the king needs an ambassador.’
‘Is it true that the Medici have offered for the Princess Mary’s
hand?’
‘Not Princess Mary, you mean the Lady Mary. I have asked
the king to think about it. But they are not grand enough for him.
You know, if Gregory showed any interest in banking, I would
look for a bride for him in Florence. It would be pleasant to have
an Italian girl in the house.’
‘Send me back there. Deploy me where I can be useful, to you
or the king, as here I am useless and worse than useless to myself,
and necessary to no one’s pleasure.’
He says, ‘Oh, by the bleached bones of Becket. Stop feeling
sorry for yourself.’ Norfolk has his own view of the queen’s friends. He rattles a
little while he expresses it, his relics clinking, his grey disordered eyebrows working over wide-open eyes. These men, he
says, these men who hang around with women! Norris, I
thought better of him! And Henry Wyatt’s son! Writing verse.
Singing. Talk-talk-talking. ‘What’s the use of talking to
women?’ he asks earnestly. ‘Cromwell, you don’t talk to
women, do you? I mean, what would be the topic? What would
you find to say?’
I’ll speak to Norfolk, he decides when he comes back from
France; ask him to incline Anne to caution. The French are
meeting the Pope in Marseilles, and in default of his own attendance Henry must be represented by his most senior peer.
Gardiner is already there. For me every day is like a holiday, he
says to Tom Wyatt, when those two are away.
Wyatt says, ‘I think Henry may have a new interest by then.’
In the days following he follows Henry’s eyes, as they rest on
various ladies of the court. Nothing in them, perhaps, except the
speculative interest of any man; it’s only Cranmer who thinks
that if you look twice at a woman you have to marry her. He
watches the king dancing with Lizzie Seymour, his hand lingering on her waist. He sees Anne watching, her expression cold,
pinched.
Next day, he lends Edward Seymour some money on very
favourable terms.
In the damp autumn mornings, when it is still half-light, his
household are out early, in the damp and dripping woods. You
don’t get torta di funghi unless you pick the raw ingredients.
Richard Riche arrives at eight o’clock, his face astonished and
alarmed. ‘They stopped me at your gate, sir, and said, where’s
your bag of mushrooms? No one comes in here without mushrooms.’ Riche’s dignity is affronted. ‘I don’t think they would
have asked the Lord Chancellor for mushrooms.’

‘Oh, they would, Richard. But in an hour you will eat them
with eggs baked in cream, and the Lord Chancellor will not.
Shall we get down to work?’
Through September he has been rounding up the priests and
monks who have been close to the Maid. He and Sir Purse sift the
papers and conduct the interrogations. The clerics are no sooner
under lock and key than they begin to deny her, and deny each
other: I never believed in her, it was Father So-and-So who
convinced me, I never wanted any trouble. As for their contacts
with Exeter’s wife, with Katherine, with Mary – each disclaims
his own involvement and rushes to implicate his brother-inChrist. The Maid’s people have been in constant contact with the
Exeter household. She herself has been at many of the chief
monastic houses of the realm – Syon Abbey, the Charterhouse at
Sheen, the Franciscan house at Richmond. He knows this
because he has many contacts among disaffected monks. In every
house there are a few, and he seeks out the most intelligent.
Katherine herself has not met the nun. Why should she? She has
Fisher to act as a go-between, and Gertrude, Lord Exeter’s wife.
The king says, ‘It is hard for me to believe Henry Courtenay
would betray me. A Garter knight, a great man in the lists, my
friend since I was a boy. Wolsey tried to part us, but I wouldn’t
have it.’ He laughs. ‘Brandon, do you remember Greenwich,
that Christmas, which year was it? Remember the snowball
fight?’
This is the whole difficulty of dealing with them, men who
are always talking about ancient pedigrees, and boyhood friendships, and things that happened when you were still trading
wool on the Antwerp exchange. You put the evidence under
their noses, and they start getting teary over snowball fights.
‘Look,’ Henry says, ‘it is Courtenay’s wife that is to blame.
When he knows the whole of her practices he will want to be rid
of her. She is fickle and weak like all her sex, easily led into
scheming. ‘So forgive her,’ he says. ‘Write her a pardon. Put these people
under a debt of gratitude to you, if you want them to leave off
their foolish sentiment towards Katherine.’
‘You think you can buy hearts?’ Charles Brandon says. He
sounds as if he would be sad if the answer were yes.
He thinks, the heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it
on a scale. ‘It is not a price in money we are offering. I have
enough to put the Courtenay family on trial, all Exeter’s people.
If we forbear to do it, we are offering their freedom and their
lands. We are giving them a chance to recoup the honour of their
name.’
Henry says, ‘His grandfather left Crookback for my father’s
service.’
‘If we forgive them they will play us for fools,’ Charles says.
‘I think not, my lord. Everything they do from now on, they
do under my eye.’
‘And the Poles, Lord Montague: what do you propose there?’
‘He should not assume he will be pardoned.’
‘Make him sweat, eh?’ Charles says. ‘I am not sure I like your
way of dealing with noblemen.’
‘They get their deserts,’ the king says. ‘Hush, my lord, I need
to think.’
A pause. Brandon’s position is too complicated for him to
sustain. He wants to say, pay them out as traitors, Cromwell: but
mind you butcher them respectfully. Suddenly his face clears.
‘Ah, now I remember Greenwich. The snow was knee-deep that
year. Ah, we were young then, Harry. You don’t get snow any
more, like you did when we were young.’
He gathers up his papers and begs to be excused. Reminiscence is setting in for the afternoon and there is work to be done.
‘Rafe, ride over to West Horsley. Tell Exeter’s wife the king
thinks all women fickle and weak – though I should have
thought he has plenty of evidence to the contrary. Tell her to set
down in writing that she has not the wit of a flea. Tell her to claim she is exceptionally easy to mislead, even for a woman. Tell her to
grovel. Advise her on the wording. You know how to do it.
Nothing can be too humble for Henry.’
This is the season for humility. The word from the talks in
Marseilles is that King Francis has fallen at the Pope’s feet and
kissed his slippers. When the news comes, Henry bellows an
obscenity and shreds the dispatch in his hands.
He collects up the pieces, lays it out on a table and reads it.
‘Francis has kept faith with you after all,’ he says. ‘Surprisingly.’
He has persuaded the Pope to suspend his bull of excommunication. England has a breathing space.
‘I wish Pope Clement in his grave,’ Henry says. ‘God knows
he is a man of filthy life, and he is always ailing, so he ought to
die. Sometimes,’ he says, ‘I pray that Katherine might be translated into glory. Is that wrong?’
‘If you snap your fingers, Majesty, a hundred priests will come
running to tell you right from wrong.’
‘It seems I prefer to hear it from you.’ Henry broods, in a
sulky twitching silence. ‘If Clement dies, who will be the next
rogue in office?’
‘I’ve put my money on Alessandro Farnese.’
‘Really?’ Henry sits up. ‘One lays bets?’
‘But the odds are short. He has thrown about such bribes to
the Roman mob all these years, that they will put the cardinals in
terror when the time comes.’
‘Remind me how many children has he.’
‘Four I know of.’
The king is looking into the tapestry on the near wall, where
white-shouldered women walk barefoot on a carpet of spring
flowers. ‘I may have another child soon.’
‘The queen has spoken to you?’
‘Not yet.’ But he sees, we all do, the flare of colour in Anne’s
cheeks, the silk sleekness of her person, the tone of command
ringing in her voice as she hands out favours and rewards to the people around her. This last week, there are more rewards than
black looks, and Stephen Vaughan’s wife, who is in the Bedchamber, says she has missed her courses. The king says, ‘She has
missed her …’ and then he stops, blushing like a schoolboy. He
crosses the room, flings open his arms and embraces him, shining
like a star, his great hands with their blazing rings seizing handfuls of the black velvet of his jacket. ‘This time for sure. England
is ours.’
Archaic, that cry from his heart: as if he were standing on the
battlefield between the bloodied banners, the crown in a thorn
bush, his enemies dead at his feet.
He disengages himself gently, smiling. He uncrumples the
memorandum he had clenched in his fist when the king seized
him; because is that not how men embrace, they knead each
other with big fists, as if to knock each other down? Henry
squeezes his arm and says, ‘Thomas, it is like hugging a sea wall.
What are you made of?’ He takes the paper. He gapes. ‘Is this
what we must do this morning? This list?’
‘Not more than fifty items. We shall soon work through.’
For the rest of the day he cannot stop smiling. Who cares for
Clement and his bulls? He might as well stand on Cheap and let
the populace pelt him. He might as well stand under the Christmas garlands – which we dust with flour in years when there is
no snow – and sing, ‘Hey nonny no, Fa-la-la, Under the trees so
green-o.’
On a cold day towards the end of November the Maid and half a
dozen of her principal supporters do penance at Paul’s Cross.
They stand shackled and barefoot in a whipping wind. The crowd
is large and boisterous, the sermon lively, telling what the Maid
did on her night walks when her sisters in religion were sleeping,
and what lurid tales of devils she told to keep her followers in
awe. Her confession is read out, at the end of which she asks the
Londoners to pray for her, and begs for the king’s mercy.
You wouldn’t know her now, for the bonny girl they had at
Lambeth. She looks haggard and ten years older. Not that she has
been hurt, he would not countenance that for a woman, and in
fact they have all talked without duress; the hard thing has been
to stop them complicating the story by rumours and fantasies, so
that half England is dragged into it. The one priest who had
persistently lied, he had simply locked up with an informer; the
man was detained for murder, and in no time at all Father Rich
had set about saving his soul and interpreting to him the Maid’s
prophecies and impressing him with the names of important
people he knew at court. Pitiful, really. But it has been necessary
to put on this show, and next he will take it to Canterbury, so
Dame Elizabeth can confess on her home ground. It is necessary
to break the hold of these people who talk of the end times and
threaten us with plagues and damnation. It is necessary to dispel
the terror they create.
Thomas More is there, jostled among the city dignitaries; he is
making towards him now, as the preachers step down and the
prisoners are being led from the platform. More rubs his cold
hands. He blows on them. ‘Her crime is, she was made use of.’
He thinks, why did Alice let you out without your gloves?
‘For all the testimony I have got,’ he says, ‘I still cannot understand how she arrived here, from the edge of the marshes to a
public scaffold at Paul’s. For sure she made no money out of it.’
‘How will you frame the charges?’ His tone is neutral, interested, lawyer-to-lawyer.
‘The common law does not deal with women who say they
can fly, or raise the dead. I shall put an act of attainder into Parliament. Treason charges for the principals. The accessories, life
imprisonment, confiscation, fines. The king will be circumspect,
I think. Even merciful. I am more interested in unravelling the
plans of these people than in exacting penalties. I don’t want a
trial with scores of defendants and hundreds of witnesses, tying
the courts up for years. More hesitates.
‘Come on,’ he says, ‘you would have seen them off that way
yourself, when you were Chancellor.’
‘You may be right. I am clear anyway.’ A pause. More says,
‘Thomas. In the name of Christ, you know that.’
‘As long as the king knows it. We must keep it firmly in his
mind. A letter from you perhaps, enquiring after the princess
Elizabeth.’
‘I can do that.’
‘Making it plain you accept her rights and title.’
‘That is not a difficulty. The new marriage is made and must be
accepted.’
‘You don’t think you could bring yourself to praise it?’
‘Why does the king want other men to praise his wife?’
‘Suppose you were to write an open letter. To say that you
have seen the light in the matter of the king’s natural jurisdiction
over the church.’ He looks across to where the prisoners are
being loaded into the waiting carts. ‘They are taking them back
to the Tower now.’ He pauses. ‘You mustn’t stand about. Come
home with me to dinner.’
‘No.’ More shakes his head. ‘I would rather be blown around
on the river and go home hungry. If I could trust you only to put
food in my mouth – but you will put words into it.’
He watches him melt into the crowd of home-going aldermen.
He thinks, More is too proud to retreat from his position. He is
afraid to lose his credibility with the scholars in Europe. We must
find some way for him to do it, that doesn’t depend on abjection.
The sky has cleared now, to a flawless lapis blue. The London
gardens are bright with berries. There is an obdurate winter
ahead. But he feels a force ready to break, as spring breaks from
the dead tree. As the word of God spreads, the people’s eyes are
opened to new truths. Until now, like Helen Barre, they knew
Noah and the Flood, but not St Paul. They could count over the
sorrows of our Blessed Mother, and say how the damned are carried down to Hell. But they did not know the manifold miracles and sayings of Christ, nor the words and deeds of the apostles, simple men who, like the poor of London, pursued simple
wordless trades. The story is much bigger than they ever thought
it was. He says to his nephew Richard, you cannot tell people
just part of the tale and then stop, or just tell them the parts you
choose. They have seen their religion painted on the walls of
churches, or carved in stone, but now God’s pen is poised, and he
is ready to write his words in the books of their hearts.
But in these same streets Chapuys sees the stirrings of sedition, a city ready to open its gates to the Emperor. He was not at
the sack of Rome but there are nights when he dreams of it as if
he had been there: the black guts spilled on antique pavements,
the half-dead draped in the fountains, the chiming of bells
through the marsh fog, and the flames of arsonists’ torches
leaping along the walls. Rome has fallen and everything within it;
it was not invaders but Pope Julius himself who knocked down
old St Peter’s, which had stood for twelve hundred years, the site
where the Emperor Constantine himself had dug the first trench,
twelve scoops of soil, one for each of the apostles; where the
Christian martyrs, sewn into the skins of wild beasts, had been
torn apart by dogs. Twenty-five feet he dug down to lay his new
foundations, through a necropolis, through twelve centuries of
fishbones and ash, his workmen’s shovels powdering the skulls
of saints. In the place where martyrs had bled, ghost-white boulders stood: marble, waiting for Michelangelo.
In the street he sees a priest carrying the host, no doubt to a
dying Londoner; the passers-by uncover their heads and kneel,
but a boy leans out of an upper window and jeers, ‘Show us your
Christ-is-Risen. Show us your Jack-in-the-Box.’ He glances up;
the boy’s face, before it vanishes, is vivid with rage.
He says to Cranmer, these people want a good authority, one
they can properly obey. For centuries Rome has asked them to
believe what only children could believe. Surely they will find it more natural to obey an English king, who will exercise his
powers under Parliament and under God.
Two days after he sees More shivering at the sermon, he
conveys a pardon to Lady Exeter. It comes with some blistering
words from the king, directed to her husband. It is St Catherine’s
Day: in honour of the saint who was threatened with martyrdom
on a wheel, we all walk in circles to our destination. At least,
that’s the theory. He has never seen anyone over the age of twelve
actually doing it.
There’s a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right
through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe
when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not
strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel
inside you the resonance of the omitted thing.
Next day, at Hampton Court, the king’s son the Duke of Richmond marries Norfolk’s daughter Mary. Anne has arranged this
marriage for the glorification of the Howards; also, to stop
Henry marrying his bastard, to the boy’s advantage, to some
princess abroad. She has persuaded the king to waive the magnificent dower payment he would have expected and, triumphant in
all her designs, she joins the dancing, her thin face flushed, her
shining hair braided with dagger-tips of diamonds. Henry
cannot take his eyes off her, and nor can he.
Richmond draws to him all other eyes, gambolling like a colt,
showing off his wedding finery, turning, leaping, bouncing and
strutting. Look at him, the older ladies say, and you will see how
his father was once: that perfect glow, skin as thin as a girl’s.
‘Master Cromwell,’ he demands, ‘tell the king my father that I
want to live with my wife. He says that I am to go back to my
household and Mary is to stay with the queen.’
‘He has a care for your health, my lord.’
‘I am fifteen next.’
‘It wants half a year till your birthday.’ The boy’s blithe expression vanishes; a stony look takes over
his face. ‘Half a year is nothing. A man of fifteen is competent.’
‘So we hear,’ Lady Rochford says, standing idly by. ‘The king
your father brought witnesses to court to say his brother could
do the deed at fifteen, and more than once a night.’
‘It is also your bride’s health that we need to think of.’
‘Brandon’s wife is younger than mine, and he has her.’
‘Every time he sees her,’ Lady Rochford says, ‘if I judge by the
startled expression on her face.’
Richmond is digging himself in for a long argument, entrenching himself behind precedent: it is his father’s way of arguing.
‘Did not my great-grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, give
birth at thirteen years, to the prince who would be Henry
Tudor?’
Bosworth, the tattered standards, the bloody field; the stained
sheet of maternity. Where do we all come from, he thinks, but
this same hole and corner dealing: sweetheart, yield to me. ‘I
never heard it improved her health,’ he says, ‘or her temper. She
had no children after.’ Suddenly he is tired of the argument; he
cuts it short, his voice tired and flat. ‘Be reasonable, my lord.
Once you’ve done it, you’ll want to do it all the time. For about
three years. That’s the way it goes. And your father has other
work in mind for you. He may send you to hold court in
Dublin.’
Jane Rochford says, ‘Be easy, my lamb. There are ways that
can be contrived. A man may always meet a woman, if she is
willing.’
‘May I speak as your friend, Lady Rochford? You risk the
king’s displeasure if you meddle in this.’
‘Oh,’ she says easily, ‘Henry will forgive anything to a pretty
woman. They only seek to do what is natural.’
The boy says, ‘Why should I live like a monk?’
‘A monk? They go to it like goats. Master Cromwell here will
tell you. ‘Perhaps,’ Richmond says, ‘it is madam the queen who wants
to keep us apart. She doesn’t mean the king to have a grandson in
the cradle, before he has a son of his own.’
‘But do you not know?’ Jane Rochford turns to him. ‘Has it
not reached your ears that La Ana is enceinte?’
She gives her the name Chapuys gives her. He sees the boy’s
face open in blank dismay. Jane says, ‘I fear by summer you will
have lost your place, sweetheart. Once he has a son born in
wedlock, you may tup to your heart’s content. You will never
reign, and your offspring will never inherit.’
It isn’t often that you see a princeling’s hopes destroyed, in the
instant it takes to pinch out a candle flame: and with the same
calculated movement, as if born of the neatness of habit. She has
not even licked her fingers.
Richmond says, his face crumpling, ‘It may be another girl.’
‘It is almost treason to hope so,’ Lady Rochford says. ‘And if
it is, she will have a third child, and a fourth. I thought she would
not conceive again but I was wrong, Master Cromwell. She has
proved herself now.’
Cranmer is in Canterbury, walking on a path of sand barefoot to
his enthronement as primate of England. The ceremony done, he
is sweeping out the priory of Christ Church, whose members
gave so much encouragement to the false prophetess. It could be
a long job, interviewing each monk, picking their stories apart.
Rowland Lee storms into town to put some brawn into the business, and Gregory is in his train; so he sits in London reading a
letter from his son, no longer nor more informative than his
schoolboy letters: And now no more for lack of time.
He writes to Cranmer, be merciful to the community there, as
nothing worse than misled. Spare the monk who gilded the
Magdalene’s letter. I suggest they give a present in cash to the
king, three hundred pounds will please him. Clean out Christ
Church and the whole diocese; Warham was archbishop for thirty years, his family are entrenched, his bastard son is archdeacon, take a new broom to them. Put in people from home: your
sad east Midlands clerks, formed under sober skies.
There is something beneath his desk, under his foot, the nature
of which he has avoided thinking about. He pushes his chair
back; it is half a shrew, a gift from Marlinspike. He picks it up
and thinks of Henry Wyatt, eating vermin in his cell. He thinks
of the cardinal, resplendent at Cardinal College. He throws the
shrew on the fire. The corpse fizzes and shrivels, bones gone
with an empty little pop. He picks up his pen and writes to
Cranmer, shake out those Oxford men from your diocese, and
put in Cambridge men we know.
He writes to his son, come home and spend the new year with
us.
December: in her frozen angularity, a blue light behind her cast
up from the snow, Margaret Pole looks as if she has stepped
from a church window, slivers of glass shaking from her gown;
in fact, those splinters are diamonds. He has made her come to
him, the countess, and now she looks at him from beneath her
heavy lids, she looks at him down her long Plantagenet nose,
and her greeting, ice-bright, flies out into the room. ‘Cromwell.’
Just that.
She comes to business. ‘The Princess Mary. Why must she quit
the house in Essex?’
‘My lord Rochford wants it for his use. It’s good hunting
country, you see. Mary is to join her royal sister’s household, at
Hatfield. She will not need her own attendants there.’
‘I offer to support my place in her household at my own
expense. You cannot prevent me from serving her.’
Try me. ‘I am only the minister of the king’s wishes, and you,
I suppose, are as anxious as I am to carry them out.’
‘These are the wishes of the concubine. We do not believe, the
princess and I, that they are the king’s own wishes.

‘You must stretch your credulity, madam.’
She looks down at him from her plinth: she is Clarence’s
daughter, old King Edward’s niece. In her time, men like him
knelt down to speak to women like her. ‘I was in Katherine the
queen’s suite on the day she was married. To the princess, I stand
as a second mother.’
‘Blood of Christ, madam, you think she needs a second? The
one she has will kill her.’
They stare at each other, across an abyss. ‘Lady Margaret, if I
may advise you … your family’s loyalty is suspect.’
‘So you say. This is why you are parting me from Mary, as
punishment. If you have matter enough to indict me, then send
me to the Tower with Elizabeth Barton.’
‘That would be much against the king’s wishes. He reveres
you, madam. Your ancestry, your great age.’
‘He has no evidence.’
‘In June last year, just after the queen was crowned, your son
Lord Montague and your son Geoffrey Pole dined with Lady
Mary. Then a scant two weeks later, Montague dined with her
again. I wonder what they discussed?’
‘Do you really?’
‘No,’ he says, smiling. ‘The boy who carried in the dish of
asparagus, that was my boy. The boy who sliced the apricots was
mine too. They talked about the Emperor, about the invasion,
how he might be brought to it. So you see, Lady Margaret, all
your family owes much to my forbearance. I trust they will
repay the king with future loyalty.’
He does not say, I mean to use your sons against their troublemaking brother abroad. He does not say, I have your son Geoffrey on my payroll. Geoffrey Pole is a violent, unstable man. You
do not know how he will turn. He has paid him forty pounds
this year to turn the Cromwell way.
The countess curls her lip. ‘The princess will not leave her
home quietly. ‘My lord of Norfolk intends to ride to Beaulieu, to tell her of
the change in her circumstances. She may defy him, of course.’
He had advised the king, leave Mary in possession of her style
as princess, do not diminish anything. Do not give her cousin the
Emperor a reason to make war.
Henry had shouted, ‘Will you go to the queen, and suggest to
her that Mary keep her title? For I tell you, Master Cromwell, I
am not going to do it. And if you put her in a great passion, as
you will, and she falls ill and miscarries her child, you will be
responsible! And I shall not incline to mercy!’
Outside the door of the presence chamber, he leans on the
wall. He rolls his eyes and says to Rafe, ‘God in Heaven, no
wonder the cardinal was old before his time. If he thinks her
pique will dislodge it, it cannot be stuck very fast. Last week I
was his brother-in-arms, this week he is threatening me with a
bloody end.’
Rafe says, ‘It is a good thing you are not like the cardinal.’
Indeed. The cardinal expected the gratitude of his prince, in
which matter he was bound to be disappointed. For all his capacities he was a man whose emotions would master him and wear
him out. He, Cromwell, is no longer subject to vagaries of
temperament, and he is almost never tired. Obstacles will be
removed, tempers will be soothed, knots unknotted. Here at the
close of the year 1533, his spirit is sturdy, his will strong, his front
imperturbable. The courtiers see that he can shape events, mould
them. He can contain the fears of other men, and give them a
sense of solidity in a quaking world: this people, this dynasty,
this miserable rainy island at the edge of the world.
By way of recreation at the end of the day, he is looking into
Katherine’s land holdings and judging what he can redistribute.
Sir Nicholas Carew, who does not like him and does not like
Anne, is amazed to receive from him a package of grants, including two fat Surrey manors to adjoin his existing holdings in the
county. He seeks an interview to express his thanks; he has to ask Richard, who keeps the Cromwell diary now, and Richard fits
him in after two days. As the cardinal used to say, deference
means making people wait.
When Carew comes in he is arranging his face. Chilly, selfabsorbed, the complete courtier, he works at turning up the
corners of his mouth. The result is a maidenly simper, incongruous above a luxuriant beard.
‘Oh, I am sure you are deserving,’ he says, shrugging it off.
‘You are a boyhood friend of His Majesty and nothing gives him
greater pleasure than to reward his old friends. Your wife is in
touch with the Lady Mary, is she not? They are close? Ask her,’
he says gently, ‘to give the young woman good advice. Warn her
to be conformable to the king in all things. His temper is short
these days and I cannot answer for the consequences of defiance.’
Deuteronomy tells us, gifts blind the eyes of the wise. Carew
is not particularly wise, in his opinion, but the principle holds
good; and if not exactly blinded, at least he looks dazed. ‘Call it
an early Christmas present,’ he tells him, smiling. He pushes the
papers across his desk.
At Austin Friars they are cleaning out store rooms and building strong rooms. They will keep the feast at Stepney. The angel’s
wings are moved there; he wants to keep them, till there is
another child in the house of the right size. He sees them going,
shivering in their shroud of fine linen, and watches the Christmas
star loaded on to a cart. Christophe asks, ‘How would one work
it, that savage machine that is all over points?’
He draws off one of the canvas sleeves, shows him the gilding.
‘Jesus Maria,’ the boy says. ‘The star that guides us to Bethlehem.
I thought it was an engine for torture.’
Norfolk goes down to Beaulieu to tell Lady Mary she must
move to the manor at Hatfield, and be an attendant to the little
princess, and live under the governance of Lady Anne Shelton,
aunt to the queen. What ensues, he reports back in aggrieved
tones. Aunt to the queen?’ says Mary. ‘There is but one queen, and
that is my mother.’
‘Lady Mary …’ Norfolk says, and the words make her burst
into tears, and run to her room and lock herself in.
Suffolk goes up the country to Buckden, to convince Katherine to move to another house. She has heard that they mean to
send her somewhere even damper than Buckden, and she says
the damp will kill her, so she too shuts herself up, rattling the
bolts into place and shouting at Suffolk in three languages to go
away. She will go nowhere, she says, unless he is prepared to
break down the door and bind her with ropes and carry her.
Which Charles thinks is a little extreme.
Brandon sounds so sorry for himself when he writes back to
London for instructions: a man with a bride of fourteen awaiting
his attentions, to spend the holiday like this! When his letter is
read out to the council, he, Cromwell, bursts out laughing. The
sheer joy of it carries him into the new year.
There is a young woman walking the roads of the kingdom,
saying she is the princess Mary, and that her father has turned her
out to beg. She has been seen as far north as York and as far east
as Lincoln, and simple people in these shires are lodging and
feeding her and giving her money to see her on her way. He has
people keeping an eye out for her, but they haven’t caught her
yet. He doesn’t know what he would do with her if he did catch
her. It is punishment enough, to take on the burden of a
prophecy, and to be out unprotected on the winter roads. He
pictures her, a dun-coloured, dwindling figure, tramping away
towards the horizon over the flat muddy fields.

III
A Painter’s Eye
1534

When Hans brings the finished portrait to Austin Friars he feels
shy of it. He remembers when Walter would say, look me in the
face, boy, when you tell me a lie.
He looks at the picture’s lower edge, and allows his gaze to
creep upwards. A quill, scissors, papers, his seal in a little bag,
and a heavy volume, bound in blackish green: the leather tooled
in gold, the pages gilt-edged. Hans had asked to see his Bible,
rejected it as too plain, too thumbed. He had scoured the house
and found the finest volume he owned on the desk of Thomas
Avery. It is the monk Pacioli’s work, the book on how to keep
your books, sent to him by his kind friends in Venice.
He sees his painted hand, resting on the desk before him,
holding a paper in a loose fist. It is uncanny, as if he had been
pulled apart, to look at himself in sections, digit by digit. Hans
has made his skin smooth as the skin of a courtesan, but the
motion he has captured, that folding of the fingers, is as sure as
that of a slaughterman’s when he picks up the killing knife. He is
wearing the cardinal’s turquoise.
He had a turquoise ring of his own, one time, which Liz gave to
him when Gregory was born. It was a ring in the shape of a heart.
He raises his eyes, to his own face. It does not much improve
on the Easter egg which Jo painted. Hans had penned him in a little space, pushing a heavy table to fasten him in. He had time
to think, while Hans drew him, and his thoughts took him far
off, to another country. You cannot trace those thoughts behind
his eyes.
He had asked to be painted in his garden. Hans said, the very
notion makes me sweat. Can we keep it simple, yes?
He wears his winter clothes. Inside them, he seems made of a
more impermeable substance than most men, more compacted.
He could well be wearing armour. He foresees the day when he
might have to. There are men in this realm and abroad (not only
in Yorkshire now) who would stab him as soon as look at him.
I doubt, he thinks, they can hack through to the heart. The
king had said, what are you made of?
He smiles. There is no trace of a smile on the face of his
painted self.
‘Right.’ He sweeps into the next room. ‘You can come and see it.’
They crowd in, jostling. There is a short, appraising silence. It
lengthens. Alice says, ‘He has made you look rather stout, Uncle.
More than he need.’
Richard says, ‘As Leonardo has demonstrated to us, a curved
surface better deflects the impact of cannon balls.’
‘I don’t think you look like that,’ Helen Barre says. ‘I see that
your features are true enough. But that is not the expression on
your face.’
Rafe says, ‘No, Helen, he saves it for men.’
Thomas Avery says, ‘The Emperor’s man is here, can he come
in and have a look?’
‘He is welcome, as always.’
Chapuys prances in. He positions himself before the painting;
he skips forward; he leaps back. He is wearing marten furs over
silks. ‘Dear God,’ Johane says behind her hand, ‘he looks like a
dancing monkey.’
‘Oh no, I fear not,’ Eustache says. ‘Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
Your Protestant painter has missed the mark this time. For one never thinks of you alone, Cremuel, but in company, studying
the faces of other people, as if you yourself mean to paint them.
You make other men think, not “what does he look like?” but
“what do I look like?”’ He whisks away, then swings around, as
if to catch the likeness in the act of moving. ‘Still. Looking at
that, one would be loath to cross you. To that extent, I think
Hans has achieved his aim.’
When Gregory comes home from Canterbury, he takes him in
alone to see the painting, still in his riding coat, muddy from the
road; he wants to hear his son’s opinion, before the rest of the
household get to him. He says, ‘Your lady mother always said
she didn’t pick me for my looks. I was surprised, when the
picture came, to find I was vain. I thought of myself as I was
when I left Italy, twenty years ago. Before you were born.’
Gregory stands at his shoulder. His eyes rest on the portrait.
He doesn’t speak.
He is conscious that his son is taller than he is: not that it takes
much. He steps sideways, though only in his mind, to see his boy
with a painter’s eye: a boy with fine white skin and hazel eyes, a
slender angel of the second rank in a fresco dappled with damp,
in some hill town far from here. He thinks of him as a page in a
forest riding across vellum, dark curls crisp under a narrow band
of gold; whereas the young men about him every day, the young
men of Austin Friars, are muscled like fighting dogs, hair
cropped to stubble, eyes sharp as sword points. He thinks,
Gregory is all he should be. He is everything I have a right to
hope for: his openness, his gentleness, the reserve and consideration with which he holds back his thoughts till he has framed
them. He feels such tenderness for him he thinks he might cry.
He turns to the painting. ‘I fear Mark was right.’
‘Who is Mark?’
‘A silly little boy who runs after George Boleyn. I once heard
him say I looked like a murderer.’
Gregory says, ‘Did you not know?’

PART SIX

I
Supremacy
1534

In the convivial days between Christmas and New Year, while
the court is feasting and Charles Brandon is in the fens shouting
at a door, he is rereading Marsiglio of Padua. In the year 1324
Marsiglio put to us forty-two propositions. When the feast of the
Epiphany is past, he ambles along to put a few of them to Henry.
Some of these propositions the king knows, some are strange
to him. Some are congenial, in his present situation; some have
been denounced to him as heresy. It’s a morning of brilliant,
bone-chilling cold, the wind off the river like a knife in the face.
We are breezing in to push our luck.
Marsiglio tells us that when Christ came into this world he
came not as a ruler or a judge, but as a subject: subject to the state
as he found it. He did not seek to rule, nor pass on to his disciples a mission to rule. He did not give power to one of his
followers more than another; if you think he did, read again
those verses about Peter. Christ did not make Popes. He did not
give his followers the power to make laws or levy taxes, both of
which churchmen have claimed as their right.
Henry says, ‘I never remember the cardinal spoke of this.’
‘Would you, if you were a cardinal?’
Since Christ did not induce his followers into earthly power,
how can it be maintained that the princes of today derive their power from the Pope? In fact, all priests are subjects, as Christ
left them. It is for the prince to govern the bodies of his citizens,
to say who is married and who can marry, who is a bastard and
who legitimate.
Where does the prince get this power, and his power to
enforce the law? He gets it through a legislative body, which acts
on behalf of the citizens. It is from the will of the people,
expressed in Parliament, that a king derives his kingship.
When he says this, Henry seems to be straining his ears, as if
he might catch the sound of the people coming down the road to
turn him out of his palace. He reassures him on the point:
Marsiglio gives no legitimacy to rebels. Citizens may indeed
band together to overthrow a despot, but he, Henry, is not a
despot; he is a monarch who rules within the law. Henry likes the
people to cheer him as he rides through London, but the wise
prince is not always the most popular prince; he knows this.
He has other propositions to put to him. Christ did not
bestow on his followers grants of land, or monopolies, offices,
promotions. All these things are the business of the secular
power. A man who has taken vows of poverty, how can he have
property rights? How can monks be landlords?
The king says, ‘Cromwell, with your facility for large
numbers …’ He stares into the distance. His fingers pick at the
silver lacing of his cuff.
‘The legislative body,’ he says, ‘should provide for the maintenance of priests and bishops. After that, it should be able to use
the church’s wealth for the public good.’
‘But how to free it,’ Henry says. ‘I suppose shrines can be
broken.’ Gem-studded himself, he thinks of the kind of wealth
you can weigh. ‘If there were any who dared.’
It is a characteristic of Henry, to run before you to where you
were not quite going. He had meant to gentle him towards an
intricate legal process of dispossession, repossession: the assertion of ancient sovereign rights, the taking back of what was always yours. He will remember that it was Henry who first
suggested picking up a chisel and gouging the sapphire eyes out
of saints. But he is willing to follow the king’s thought. ‘Christ
taught us how to remember him. He left us bread and wine, body
and blood. What more do we need? I cannot see where he asked
for shrines to be set up, or instituted a trade in body parts, in hair
and nails, or asked us to make plaster images and worship them.’
‘Would you be able to estimate,’ Henry says, ‘even … no, I
suppose you wouldn’t.’ He gets to his feet. ‘Well, the sun shines,
so …’
Better make hay. He sweeps the day’s papers together. ‘I can
finish up.’ Henry goes off to get into his double-padded riding
coat. He thinks, we don’t want our king to be the poor man of
Europe. Spain and Portugal have treasure flowing in every year
from the Americas. Where is our treasure?
Look around you.
His guess is, the clergy own a third of England. One day soon,
Henry will ask him how the Crown can own it instead. It’s like
dealing with a child; one day you bring in a box, and the child
asks, what is in there? Then it goes to sleep and forgets, but next
day, it asks again. It doesn’t rest until the box is open and the
treats given out.
Parliament is about to reconvene. He says to the king, no parliament in history has worked as hard as I mean to work this one.
Henry says, ‘Do what you have to do. I will back you.’
It’s like hearing words you’ve waited all your life to hear. It’s
like hearing a perfect line of poetry, in a language you knew
before you were born.
He goes home happy, but the cardinal is waiting for him in a
corner. He is plump as a cushion in his scarlet robes and his face
wears a martial and mutinous expression. Wolsey says, you
know he will take the credit for your good ideas, and you the
blame for his bad ones? When fortune turns against you, you
will feel her lash: you always, he never. He says, my dear Wolsey. (For now that cardinals are finished
in this realm, he addresses him as a colleague, not a master.) My
dear Wolsey, not entirely so – he didn’t blame Charles Brandon
for splintering a lance inside his helmet, he blamed himself for
not putting his visor down.
The cardinal says, do you think this is a tilting ground? Do
you think there are rules, protocols, judges to see fair play? One
day, when you are still adjusting your harness, you will look up
and see him thundering at you downhill.
The cardinal vanishes, with a chortle.
Even before the Commons convenes, his opponents meet to
work out their tactics. Their meetings are not secret. Servants go
in and out, and his method with the Pole conclaves bears repeating: there are young men in the Cromwell household not too
proud to put on an apron and bring in a platter of halibut or a
joint of beef. The gentlemen of England apply for places in his
household now, for their sons and nephews and wards, thinking
they will learn statecraft with him, how to write a secretary’s
hand and deal with translation from abroad, and what books one
ought to read to be a courtier. He takes it seriously, the trust
placed in him; he takes gently from the hands of these noisy
young persons their daggers, their pens, and he talks to them,
finding out behind the passion and pride of young men of fifteen
or twenty what they are really worth, what they value and would
value under duress. You learn nothing about men by snubbing
them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they
can do in this world, that they alone can do.
The boys are astonished by the question, their souls pour out.
Perhaps no one has talked to them before. Certainly not their
fathers.
You introduce these boys, violent or unscholarly as they are,
to humble occupations. They learn the psalms. They learn the
use of a filleting blade and a paring knife; only then, for selfdefence and in no formal lesson, they learn the estoc, the killing jerk under the ribs, the simple twist of the wrist that makes you
sure. Christophe offers himself as instructor. These messieurs, he
says, be sure they are dainty. They are cutting off the head of the
stag or the tail of the rat, I know not what, to send home to their
dear papa. Only you and me, master, and Richard Cremuel, we
know how to stop some little fuckeur in his tracks, so that’s the
end of him, and he doesn’t even squeak.
Before spring comes, some of the poor men who stand at his
gate find their way inside it. The eyes and ears of the unlettered
are as sharp as those of the gentry, and you need not be a scholar
to have a good wit. Horseboys and kennelmen overhear the
confidences of earls. A boy with kindling and bellows hears the
sleepy secrets of early morning, when he goes in to light a fire.
On a day of strong sunlight, sudden and deceptive warmth,
Call-Me-Risley strides into Austin Friars. He barks, ‘Give you
good morning, sir,’ throws off his jacket, sits down to his desk
and scrapes forward his stool. He picks up his quill and looks at
the tip of it. ‘Right, what do you have for me?’ His eyes are glittering and the tips of his ears are pink.
‘I think Gardiner must be back,’ he says.
‘How did you know?’ Call-Me throws down his pen. He
jumps up. He strides about. ‘Why is he like he is? All this wrangling and jangling and throwing out questions when he doesn’t
care about the answers?’
‘You liked it well enough when you were at Cambridge.’
‘Oh, then,’ Wriothesley says, with contempt for his young
self. ‘It’s supposed to train our minds. I don’t know.’
‘My son claims it wore him out, the practice of scholarly
disputation. He calls it the practice of futile argument.’
‘Perhaps Gregory’s not completely stupid.’
‘I would be glad to think not.’
Call-Me blushes a deep red. ‘I mean no offence, sir. You know
Gregory’s not like us. As the world goes, he is too good. But you
don’t have to be like Gardiner, either. ‘When the cardinal’s advisers met, we would propose plans,
there would perhaps be some dispute, but we would talk it
through; then we would refine our plans, and implement them.
The king’s council doesn’t work like that.’
‘How could it? Norfolk? Charles Brandon? They’ll fight you
because of who you are. Even if they agree with you, they’ll fight
you. Even if they know you’re right.’
‘I suppose Gardiner has been threatening you.’
‘With ruin.’ He folds one fist into the other. ‘I don’t regard
it.’
‘But you should. Winchester is a powerful man and if he says
he will ruin you that is what he means to do.’
‘He calls me disloyal. He says while I was abroad I should
have minded his interests, instead of yours.’
‘My understanding is, you serve Master Secretary, whoever is
acting in that capacity. If I,’ he hesitates, ‘if – Wriothesley, I make
you this offer, if I am confirmed in the post, I will put you in
charge at the Signet.’
‘I will be chief clerk?’ He sees Call-Me adding up the fees.
‘So now, go to Gardiner, apologise, and get him to make you a
better offer. Hedge your bets.’
His face alarmed, Call-Me hovers. ‘Run, boy.’ He scoops up
his jacket and thrusts it at him. ‘He’s still Secretary. He can have
his seals back. Only tell him, he has to come here and collect
them in person.’
Call-Me laughs. He rubs his forehead, dazed, as if he’s been in
a fight. He throws on his coat. ‘We’re hopeless, aren’t we?’
Inveterate scrappers. Wolves snapping over a carcase. Lions
fighting over Christians.
The king calls him in, with Gardiner, to look through the bill he
proposes to put into Parliament to secure the succession of
Anne’s children. The queen is with them; many private gentlemen see less of their wives, he thinks, than the king does. He rides, Anne rides. He hunts, Anne hunts. She takes his friends,
and makes them into hers.
She has a habit of reading over Henry’s shoulder; she does it
now, her exploring hand sliding across his silky bulk, through
the layers of his clothing, so that a tiny fingernail hooks itself
beneath the embroidered collar of his shirt, and she raises the
fabric just a breath, just a fraction, from pale royal skin; Henry’s
vast hand reaches to caress hers, an absent, dreamy motion, as if
they were alone. The draft refers, time and again, and correctly it
would seem, to ‘your most dear and entirely beloved wife Queen
Anne’.
The Bishop of Winchester is gaping. As a man, he cannot
unglue himself from the spectacle, yet as a bishop, it makes him
clear his throat. Anne takes no notice; she carries on doing what
she’s doing, and reading out the bill, until she looks up, shocked:
it mentions my death! ‘If it should happen your said dear and
entirely beloved wife Queen Anne to decease …’
‘I can’t exclude the event,’ he says. ‘Parliament can do
anything, madam, except what is against nature.’
She flushes. ‘I shall not die of the child. I am strong.’
He doesn’t remember that Liz lost her wits when she was
carrying a child. If anything, she was ever more sober and frugal,
and spent time making store-cupboard inventories. Anne the
queen takes the draft out of Henry’s hand. She shakes it in a
passion. She is angry with the paper, jealous of the ink. She says,
‘This bill provides that if I die, say I die now, say I die of a fever
and I die undelivered, then he can put another queen in my
place.’
‘Sweetheart,’ the king says, ‘I cannot imagine another in your
place. It is only notional. He must make provision for it.’
‘Madam,’ Gardiner says, ‘if I may defend Cromwell, he envisages only the customary situation. You would not condemn His
Majesty to a life as perpetual widower? And we know not the
hour, do we? Anne takes no notice, it’s as if Winchester had not spoken.
‘And if she has a son, it says, that son will inherit. It says, heirs
male lawfully begotten. Then what happens to my daughter and
her claim?’
‘Well,’ Henry says, ‘she is still a princess of England. If you
look further down the paper, it says that …’ He closes his eyes.
God give me strength.
Gardiner springs to supply some: ‘If the king never had a son,
not in lawful matrimony with any woman, then your daughter
would be queen. That is what Cromwell proposes.’
‘But why must it be written like this? And where does it say
that Spanish Mary is a bastard?’
‘Lady Mary is out of the line of succession,’ he says, ‘so the
inference is clear. We don’t need to say more. You must forgive
any coldness of expression. We try to write laws sparingly. And
so that they are not personal.’
‘By God,’ Gardiner says with relish, ‘if this isn’t personal,
what is?’
The king seems to have invited Stephen to this conference in
order to snub him. Tomorrow, of course, it could go the other
way; he could arrive to see Henry arm in arm with Winchester
and strolling among the snowdrops. He says, ‘We mean to seal
this act with an oath. His Majesty’s subjects to swear to uphold
the succession to the throne, as laid out in this paper and ratified
by Parliament.’
‘An oath?’ Gardiner says. ‘What sort of legislation needs to be
confirmed by an oath?’
‘You will always find those who will say a parliament is
misled, or bought, or in some way incapable of representing the
commonwealth. Again, you will find those who will deny Parliament’s competence to legislate in certain matters, saying they
must be left to some other jurisdiction – to Rome, in effect. But I
think that is a mistake. Rome has no legitimate voice in England.
In my bill I mean to state a position. It is a modest one. I draft it, it may please Parliament to pass it, it may please the king to sign
it. I shall then ask the country to endorse it.’
‘So what will you do?’ Stephen says, jeering. ‘Have your
boys from Austin Friars up and down the land, swearing every
man Jack you dig out of an alehouse? Every man Jack and every
Jill?’
‘Why should I not swear them? Do you think because they are
not bishops they are brutes? One Christian’s oath is as good as
another’s. Look at any part of this kingdom, my lord bishop, and
you will find dereliction, destitution. There are men and women
on the roads. The sheep farmers are grown so great that the little
man is knocked off his acres and the ploughboy is out of house
and home. In a generation these people can learn to read. The
ploughman can take up a book. Believe me, Gardiner, England
can be otherwise.’
‘I have made you angry,’ Gardiner observes. ‘Provoked, you
mistake the question. I asked you not if their word is good, but
how many of them you propose to swear. But of course, in the
Commons you have brought in a bill against sheep –’
‘Against the runners of sheep,’ he says, smiling.
The king says, ‘Gardiner, it is to help the common people – no
grazier to run more than two thousand animals –’
The bishop cuts his king off as if he were a child. ‘Two thousand, yes, so while your commissioners are rampaging through
the shires counting sheep, perhaps they can swear the shepherds
at the same time, eh? And these ploughboys of yours, in their
preliterate condition? And any drabs they find in a ditch?’
He has to laugh. The bishop is so vehement. ‘My lord, I will
swear whoever is necessary to make the succession safe, and
unite the country behind us. The king has his officers, his justices
of the peace – and the lords of the council will be put on their
honour to make this work, or I will know why.’
Henry says, ‘The bishops will take the oath. I hope they will
be conformable.’ ‘We want some new bishops,’ Anne says. She names her friend
Hugh Latimer. His friend, Rowland Lee. It seems after all she
does have a list, which she carries in her head. Liz made
preserves. Anne makes pastors.
‘Latimer?’ Stephen shakes his head, but he cannot accuse the
queen, to her face, of loving heretics. ‘Rowland Lee, to my
certain knowledge, has never stood in a pulpit in his life. Some
men come into the religious life only for ambition.’
‘And have barely the grace to disguise it,’ he says.
‘I make the best of my road,’ Stephen says. ‘I was set upon it.
By God, Cromwell, I walk it.’
He looks up at Anne. Her eyes sparkle with glee. Not a word
is lost on her.
Henry says, ‘My lord Winchester, you have been out of the
country a great while, on your embassy.’
‘I hope Your Majesty thinks it has been to his profit.’
‘Indeed, but you have not been able to avoid neglecting your
diocese.’
‘As a pastor, you should mind your flock,’ Anne says. ‘Count
them, perhaps.’
He bows. ‘My flock is safe in fold.’
Short of kicking the bishop downstairs himself, or having him
hauled out by the guards, the king can’t do much more. ‘All the
same, feel free to attend to it,’ Henry murmurs.
There is a feral stink that rises from the hide of a dog about to
fight. It rises now into the room, and he sees Anne turn aside,
fastidious, and Stephen put his hand to his chest, as if to ruffle up
his fur, to warn of his size before he bares his teeth. ‘I shall be
back with Your Majesty within a week,’ he says. His dulcet sentiment comes out as a snarl from the depth of his guts.
Henry bursts into laughter. ‘Meanwhile we like Cromwell.
Cromwell treats us very well.’
Once Winchester has gone, Anne hangs over the king again;
her eyes flick sideways, as if she were drawing him into conspir acy. Anne’s bodice is still tight-laced, only a slight fullness of her
breasts indicating her condition. There has been no announcement; announcements are never made, women’s bodies are
uncertain things and mistakes can occur. But the whole court is
sure she is carrying the heir, and she says so herself; apples are
not mentioned this time, and all the foods she craved when she
was carrying the princess revolt her, so the signs are good it will
be a boy. This bill he will bring into the Commons is not, as she
thinks, some anticipation of disaster, but a confirmation of her
place in the world. She must be thirty-three this year. For how
many years did he laugh at her flat chest and yellow skin? Even
he can see her beauty, now she is queen. Her face seems sculpted
in the purity of its lines, her skull small like a cat’s; her throat has
a mineral glitter, as if it were powdered with fool’s gold.
Henry says, ‘Stephen is a resolute ambassador, no doubt, but I
cannot keep him near me. I have trusted him with my innermost
councils, and now he turns.’ He shakes his head. ‘I hate ingratitude. I hate disloyalty. That is why I value a man like you. You
were good to your old master in his trouble. Nothing could
commend you more to me, than that.’ He speaks as if he, personally, hadn’t caused the trouble; as if Wolsey’s fall were caused by
a thunderbolt. ‘Another who has disappointed me is Thomas
More.’
Anne says, ‘When you write your bill against the false
prophetess Barton, put More in it, beside Fisher.’
He shakes his head. ‘It won’t run. Parliament won’t have it.
There is plenty of evidence against Fisher, and the Commons
don’t like him, he talks to them as if they were Turks. But More
came to me even before Barton was arrested and showed me how
he was clear in the matter.’
‘But it will frighten him,’ Anne says. ‘I want him frightened.
Fright may unmake a man. I have seen it occur. Three in the afternoon: candles brought in. He consults
Richard’s day-book: John Fisher is waiting. It is time to be
enraged. He tries thinking about Gardiner, but he keeps laughing. ‘Arrange your face,’ Richard says.
‘You’d never imagine that Stephen owed me money. I paid for
his installation at Winchester.’
‘Call it in, sir.’
‘But I have already taken his house for the queen. He is still
grieving. I had better not drive him to an extremity. I ought to
leave him a way back.’
Bishop Fisher is seated, his skeletal hands resting on an ebony
cane. ‘Good evening, my lord,’ he says. ‘Why are you so
gullible?’
The bishop seems surprised that they are not to start off with
a prayer. Nevertheless, he murmurs a blessing.
‘You had better ask the king’s pardon. Beg the favour of it.
Plead with him to consider your age and infirmities.’
‘I do not know my offence. And, whatever you think, I am not
in my second childhood.’
‘But I believe you are. How else would you have given
credence to this woman Barton? If you came across a puppet
show in the street, would you not stand there cheering, and
shout, “Look at their little wooden legs walking, look how they
wave their arms? Hear them blow their trumpets”. Would you
not?’
‘I don’t think I ever saw a puppet show,’ Fisher says sadly. ‘At
least, not one of the kind of which you speak.’
‘But you’re in one, my lord bishop! Look around you. It’s all
one great puppet show.’
‘And yet so many did believe in her,’ Fisher says mildly.
‘Warham himself, Canterbury that was. A score, a hundred
of devout and learned men. They attested her miracles. And
why should she not voice her knowledge, being inspired? We
know that before the Lord goes to work, he gives warning of himself through his servants, for it is stated by the prophet
Amos …’
‘Don’t prophet Amos me, man. She threatened the king.
Foresaw his death.’
‘Foreseeing it is not the same as desiring it, still less plotting it.’
‘Ah, but she never foresaw anything that she didn’t hope
would happen. She sat down with the king’s enemies and told
them how it would be.’
‘If you mean Lord Exeter,’ the bishop says, ‘he is already
pardoned, of course, and so is Lady Gertrude. If they were
guilty, the king would have proceeded.’
‘That does not follow. Henry wishes for reconciliation. He
finds it in him to be merciful. As he may be to you even yet, but
you must admit your faults. Exeter has not been writing against
the king, but you have.’
‘Where? Show me.’
‘Your hand is disguised, my lord, but not from me. Now you
will publish no more.’ Fisher’s glance shoots upwards. Delicately, his bones move beneath his skin; his fist grips his cane, the
handle of which is a gilded dolphin. ‘Your printers abroad are
working for me now. My friend Stephen Vaughan has offered
them a better rate.’
‘It is about the divorce you are hounding me,’ Fisher says. ‘It
is not about Elizabeth Barton. It is because Queen Katherine
asked my counsel and I gave it.’
‘You say I am hounding you, when I ask you to keep within
the law? Do not try to lead me away from your prophetess, or I
will lead you where she is and lock you up next door to her.
Would you have been so keen to believe her, if in one of her
visions she had seen Anne crowned queen a year before it
occurred, and Heaven smiling down on the event? In that case, I
put it to you, you would have called her a witch.’
Fisher shakes his head; he retreats into bafflement. ‘I always
wondered, you know, it has puzzled me many a year, if in the gospels Mary Magdalene was the same Mary who was Martha’s
sister. Elizabeth Barton told me for a certainty she was. In the
whole matter, she didn’t hesitate.’
He laughs. ‘Oh, she’s familiar with these people. She’s in and
out of their houses. She’s shared a bowl of pottage many a time
with our Blessed Lady. Look now, my lord, holy simplicity was
well enough in its day, but its day is over. We’re at war. Just
because the Emperor’s soldiers aren’t running down the street,
don’t deceive yourself – this is a war and you are in the enemy
camp.’
The bishop is silent. He sways a little on his stool. Sniffs. ‘I see
why Wolsey retained you. You are a ruffian and so was he. I have
been a priest forty years, and I have never seen such ungodly men
as those who flourish today. Such evil councillors.’
‘Fall ill,’ he says. ‘Take to your bed. That’s what I recommend.’
The bill of attainder against the Maid and her allies is laid before
the House of Lords on a Saturday morning, 21 February. Fisher’s
name is in it and so, at Henry’s command, is More’s. He goes to
the Tower to see the woman Barton, to see if she has anything
else to get off her conscience before her death is scheduled.
She has survived the winter, trailed across country to her
outdoor confessions, standing exposed on scaffolds in the
cutting wind. He brings a candle in with him, and finds her
slumped on her stool like a badly tied bundle of rags; the air is
both cold and stale. She looks up and says, as if they were resuming a conversation, ‘Mary Magdalene told me I should die.’
Perhaps, he thinks, she has been talking to me in her head.
‘Did she give you a date?’
‘You’d find that helpful?’ she asks. He wonders if she knows
that Parliament, indignant over More’s inclusion, could delay the
bill against her till spring. ‘I’m glad you’ve come, Master
Cromwell. Nothing happens here.

Not even his most prolonged, his most subtle interrogations
had frightened her. To get Katherine pulled into it, he had tried
every trick he knew: with no result. He says, ‘You are fed properly, are you?’
‘Oh yes. And my laundry done. But I miss it, when I used to
go to Lambeth, see the archbishop, I liked that. Seeing the river.
All the people bustling along, and the boats unloading. Do you
know if I shall be burned? Lord Audley said I would be burned.’
She speaks as if Audley were an old friend.
‘I hope you can be spared that. It is for the king to say.’
‘I go to Hell these nights,’ she says. ‘Master Lucifer shows me
a chair. It is carved of human bones and padded with cushions of
flame.’
‘Is it for me?’
‘Bless you, no. For the king.’
‘Any sightings of Wolsey?’
‘The cardinal’s where I left him.’ Seated among the unborn.
She pauses; a long drifting pause. ‘They say it can take an hour
for the body to burn. Mother Mary will exalt me. I shall bathe in
the flames, as one bathes in a fountain. To me, they will be cool.’
She looks into his face but at his expression she turns away.
‘Sometimes they pack gunpowder in the wood, don’t they?
Makes it quick then. How many will be going with me?’
Six. He names them. ‘It could have been sixty. Do you know
that? Your vanity brought them here.’
As he says it he thinks, it is also true that their vanity brought
her: and he sees that she would have preferred sixty to die, to see
Exeter and the Pole family pulled down to disgrace; it would
have sealed her fame. That being so, why would she not name
Katherine as party to the plot? What a triumph that would be for
a prophet, to ruin a queen. There, he thinks, I shouldn’t have
been so subtle after all; I should have played on her greed to be
infamous. ‘Shall I not see you again?’ she says. ‘Or will you be
there, when I suffer?’ ‘This throne,’ he says. ‘This chair of bones. It would be as well
to keep it to yourself. Not to let the king hear of it.’
‘I think he ought. He should have warning of what is waiting
for him after death. And what can he do to me, worse than he
already plans?’
‘You don’t want to plead your belly?’
She blushes. ‘I’m not with child. You’re laughing at me.’
‘I would advise anyone to get a few more weeks of life, by any
means they can. Say you have been ill-used on the road. Say your
guards have dishonoured you.’
‘But then I would have to say who did it, and they would be
taken before a judge.’
He shakes his head, pitying her. ‘When a guard despoils a prisoner, he doesn’t leave her his name.’
Anyway, she doesn’t like his idea, that’s plain. He leaves her.
The Tower is like a small town and its morning routine clatters
on around him, the guards and the men from the Mint greet him,
and the keeper of the king’s beasts trots up to say it’s dinner time
– they eat early, the beasts – and does he want to see them fed? I
take it very kindly, he says, waiving the pleasure; unbreakfasted
himself, slightly nauseous, he can smell stale blood and from the
direction of their cages hear their truffling grunts and smothered
roars. High up on the walls above the river, out of sight, a man is
whistling an old tune, and at the refrain breaks into song; he is a
jolly forester, he sings. Which is most certainly untrue.
He looks around for his boatmen. He wonders whether the
Maid is ill, and whether she will live to be killed. She was never
harmed in his custody, only harassed; kept awake a night or two,
but no longer than the king’s business keeps him awake, and you
don’t, he thinks, find me confessing to anything. It’s nine
o’clock; by ten o’clock dinner, he has to be with Norfolk and
Audley, who he hopes will not scream and smell, like the beasts.
There is a tentative, icy sun; loops of vapour coil across the river,
a scribble of mist. At Westminster, the duke chases out the servants. ‘If I want a
drink I’ll get it for myself. Go on, out, out you go. And shut the
door! Any lurking at the keyhole, I’ll skin you alive and salt
you!’ He turns, swearing under his breath, and takes his chair
with a grunt. ‘What if I begged him?’ he says. ‘What if I went
down on my knees, said, Henry for the Lord’s sake, take Thomas
More out of the attainder?’
‘What if we all begged him,’ Audley says, ‘on our knees?’
‘Oh, and Cranmer too,’ he says. ‘We’ll have him in. He’s not
to escape this delectable interlude.’
‘The king swears,’ Audley says, ‘that if the bill is opposed, he will
come before Parliament himself, both houses if need be, and insist.’
‘He may have a fall,’ the duke says. ‘And in public. For God’s
sake, Cromwell, don’t let him do it. He knew More was against
him and he let him creep off to Chelsea to coddle his conscience.
But it’s my niece, I suppose, who wants him brought to book.
She takes it personally. Women do.’
‘I think the king takes it personally.’
‘Which is weak,’ Norfolk says, ‘in my view. Why should he
care how More judges him?’
Audley smiles uncertainly. ‘You call the king weak?’
‘Call the king weak?’ The duke lurches forward and squawks
into Audley’s face, as if he were a talking magpie. ‘What’s this,
Lord Chancellor, speaking up for yourself? You do usually wait
till Cromwell speaks, and then it’s chirrup-chirrup, yes-sir-nosir, whatever you say, Tom Cromwell.’
The door opens and Call-Me-Risley appears, in part. ‘By
God,’ says the duke, ‘if I had a crossbow, I’d shoot your very
head off. I said nobody was to come in here.’
‘Will Roper is here. He has letters from his father-in-law.
More wants to know what you will do for him, sir, as you have
admitted that in law he has no case to answer.’
‘Tell Will we are just now rehearsing how to beg the king to
take More’s name out of the bill. The duke knocks back his drink, the one he has poured
himself. He bounces his goblet back on the table. ‘Your cardinal
used to say, Henry will give half his realm rather than be baulked,
he will not be cheated of any part of his will.’
‘But I reason … do not you, Lord Chancellor …’
‘Oh, he does,’ the duke says. ‘Whatever you reason, Tom, he
reasons. Squawk, squawk.’
Wriothesley looks startled. ‘Could I bring Will in?’
‘So we are united? On our knees to beg?’
‘I won’t do it unless Cranmer will,’ the duke says. ‘Why
should a layman wear out his joints?’
‘Shall we send for my lord Suffolk too?’ Audley suggests.
‘No. His boy is dying. His heir.’ The duke scrubs his hand
across his mouth. ‘He wants just a month of his eighteenth birthday.’ His fingers fidget for his holy medals, his relics. ‘Brandon’s
got the one boy. So have I. So have you, Cromwell. And Thomas
More. Just the one boy. God help Charles, he’ll have to start
breeding again with his new wife; that’ll be a hardship to him,
I’m sure.’ He gives a bark of laughter. ‘If I could pension my lady
wife off, I could get a juicy fifteen-year-old too. But she won’t
go.’
It is too much for Audley. His face flushes. ‘My lord, you have
been married, and well married, these twenty years.’
‘Do I not know it? It’s like placing your person in a grizzled
leather bag.’ The duke’s bony hand descends; he squeezes his
shoulder. ‘Get me a divorce, Cromwell, will you? You and my
lord archbishop, come up with some grounds. I promise there’ll
be no murder done over it.’
‘Where is murder done?’ Wriothesley says.
‘We’re preparing to murder Thomas More, aren’t we? Old
Fisher, we’re whetting the knife for him, eh?’
‘God forbid.’ The Lord Chancellor rises, sweeping his gown
around him. ‘These are not capital charges. More and the Bishop
of Rochester, they are only accessories.’ ‘Which,’ Wriothesley says, ‘in all conscience is grave enough.’
Norfolk shrugs. ‘Kill them now or later. More won’t take
your oath. Fisher won’t.’
‘I am quite sure they will,’ Audley says. ‘We shall use efficacious persuasions. No reasonable man will refuse to swear to the
succession, for the safety of this realm.’
‘So is Katherine to be sworn,’ the duke says, ‘to uphold the
succession of my niece’s infant? What about Mary – is she to be
sworn? And if they will not, what do you propose? Draw them
to Tyburn on a hurdle and hang them up kicking, for their relative the Emperor to see?’
He and Audley exchange a glance. Audley says, ‘My lord, you
shouldn’t drink so much wine before noon.’
‘Oh, tweet, tweet,’ the duke says.
A week ago he had been up to Hatfield, to see the two royal
ladies: the princess Elizabeth, and Lady Mary the king’s daughter. ‘Make sure you get the titles right,’ he had said to Gregory as
they rode.
Gregory had said, ‘Already you are wishing you had brought
Richard.’
He had not wanted to leave London during such a busy parliament, but the king persuaded him: two days and you can be back,
I want your eye on things. The route out of the city was running
with thaw water, and in copses shielded from the sun the standing
pools were still iced. A weak sun blinked at them as they crossed
into Hertfordshire, and here and there a ragged blackthorn blossomed, waving at him a petition against the length of winter.
‘I used to come here years ago. It was Cardinal Morton’s place,
you know, and he would leave town when the law term was over
and the weather was getting warm, and when I was nine or ten
my uncle John used to pack me in a provisions cart with the best
cheeses and the pies, in case anybody tried to steal them when we
stopped. ‘Did you not have guards?’
‘It was the guards he was afraid of.’
‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’
‘Me, evidently.’
‘What would you have done?’
‘I don’t know. Bitten them?’
The mellow brick frontage is smaller than he remembers, but
that is what memory does. These pages and gentlemen running
out, these grooms to lead away the horses, the warmed wine that
awaits them, the noise and the fuss, it is a different sort of arrival
from those of long ago. The portage of wood and water, the
firing up the ranges, these tasks were beyond the strength or skill
of a child, but he was unwilling to concede them, and worked
alongside the men, grubby and hungry, till someone saw that he
was about to fall over: or until he actually did.
Sir John Shelton is head of this strange household, but he has
chosen a time when Sir John is from home; talk to the women,
is his idea, rather than listen to Shelton after supper on the
subjects of horses, dogs and his youthful exploits. But on the
threshold, he almost changes his mind; coming downstairs at a
rapid, creaking scuttle is Lady Bryan, mother of one-eyed
Francis, who is in charge of the tiny princess. She is a woman of
nearly seventy, well bedded into grand-maternity, and he can
see her mouth moving before she is within range of his hearing:
Her Grace slept till eleven, squalled till midnight, exhausted
herself, poor little chicken! fell asleep an hour, woke up grizzling, cheeks scarlet, suspicion of fever, Lady Shelton woken,
physician aroused, teething already, a treacherous time! soothing draught, settled by sun-up, woke at nine, took a feed …
‘Oh, Master Cromwell,’ Lady Bryan says, ‘this is never your
son! Bless him! What a lovely tall young man! What a pretty
face he has, he must get it from his mother. What age would he
be now?’
‘Of an age to talk, I believe.’ Lady Bryan turns to Gregory, her face aglow as if at the
prospect of sharing a nursery rhyme with him. Lady Shelton
sweeps in. ‘Give you good day, masters.’ A small hesitation: does
the queen’s aunt bow to the Master of the Jewel House? On the
whole she thinks not. ‘I expect Lady Bryan has given you a full
account of her charge?’
‘Indeed, and perhaps we could have an account of yours?’
‘You will not see Lady Mary for yourself?’
‘Yes, but forewarned …’
‘Indeed. I do not go armed, though my niece the queen recommends I use my fists on her.’ Her eyes sweep over him, assessing;
the air crackles with tension. How do women do that? One
could learn it, perhaps; he feels, rather than sees, his son back off,
till his regress is checked by the cupboard displaying the princess
Elizabeth’s already extensive collection of gold and silver plate.
Lady Shelton says, ‘I am charged that, if the Lady Mary does not
obey me, I should, and here I quote you my niece’s words, beat
her and buffet her like the bastard she is.’
‘Oh, Mother of God!’ Lady Bryan moans. ‘I was Mary’s nurse
too, and she was stubborn as an infant, so she’ll not change now,
buffet her as you may. You’d like to see the baby first, would you
not? Come with me …’ She takes Gregory into custody, hand
squeezing his elbow. On she rattles: you see, with a child of that
age, a fever could be anything. It could be the start of the measles,
God forbid. It could be the start of the smallpox. With a child of
six months, you don’t know what it could be the start of … A
pulse is beating in Lady Bryan’s throat. As she chatters she licks
her dry lips, and swallows.
He understands now why Henry wanted him here. The things
that are happening cannot be put in a letter. He says to Lady
Shelton, ‘Do you mean the queen has written to you about Lady
Mary, using these terms?’
‘No. She has passed on a verbal instruction.’ She sweeps ahead
of him. ‘Do you think I should implement it? ‘We will perhaps speak in private,’ he murmurs.
‘Yes, why not?’ she says: a turn of her head, a little murmur
back.
The child Elizabeth is wrapped tightly in layers, her fists
hidden: just as well, she looks as if she would strike you. Ginger
bristles poke from beneath her cap, and her eyes are vigilant; he
has never seen an infant in the crib look so ready to take offence.
Lady Bryan says, ‘Do you think she looks like the king?’
He hesitates, trying to be fair to both parties. ‘As much as a
little maid ought.’
‘Let us hope she doesn’t share his girth,’ Lady Shelton says.
‘He fleshes out, does he not?’
‘Only George Rochford says not.’ Lady Bryan leans over the
cradle. ‘He says, she’s every bit a Boleyn.’
‘We know my niece lived some thirty years in chastity,’ Lady
Shelton says, ‘but not even Anne could manage a virgin birth.’
‘But the hair!’ he says.
‘I know,’ Lady Bryan sighs. ‘Saving Her Grace’s dignity, and
with all respect to His Majesty, you could show her at a fair as a
pig-baby.’ She pinches up the child’s cap at the hairline, and her
fingers work busily, trying to stuff the bristles out of sight. The
child screws up her face and hiccups in protest.
Gregory frowns down at her: ‘She could be anybody’s.’
Lady Shelton raises a hand to hide her smile. ‘You mean to say,
Gregory, all babies look the same. Come, Master Cromwell.’
She takes him by the sleeve to lead him away. Lady Bryan is
left reknotting the princess, who seems to have become loose in
some particular. Over his shoulder, he says, ‘For God’s sake,
Gregory.’ People have gone to the Tower for saying less. He says
to Lady Shelton, ‘I don’t see how Mary can be a bastard. Her
parents were in good faith when they got her.’
She stops, an eyebrow raised. ‘Would you say that to my niece
the queen? To her face, I mean?’
‘I already have.’ ‘And how did she take it?’
‘Well, I tell you, Lady Shelton, if she had had an axe to hand,
she would have essayed to cut off my head.’
‘I tell you something in return, and you can carry it to my
niece if you will. If Mary were indeed a bastard, and the bastard
of the poorest landless gentleman that is in England, she should
receive nothing but gentle treatment at my hands, for she is a
good young woman, and you would need a heart of stone not to
pity her situation.’
She is walking fast, her train sweeping over stone floors, into
the body of the house. Mary’s old servants are about, faces he has
seen before; there are clean patches on their jackets where Mary’s
livery badge has been unpicked and replaced by the king’s badge.
He looks about and recognises everything. He stops at the foot
of the great staircase. Never was he allowed to run up it; there
was a back staircase for boys like him, carrying wood or coals.
Once he broke the rules; and when he reached the top, a fist came
out of the darkness and punched the side of his head. Cardinal
Morton himself, lurking?
He touches the stone, cold as a tomb: vine leaves intertwined
with some nameless flower. Lady Shelton looks at him smiling,
quizzical: why does he hesitate? ‘Perhaps we should change out
of our riding clothes before we meet Lady Mary. She might feel
slighted …’
‘So she might if you delay. She will make something of it, in
either case. I say I pity her, but oh, she is not easy! She graces
neither our dinner table nor supper table, because she will not sit
below the little princess. And my niece the queen has laid down
that food must not be carried to her own room, except the little
bread for breakfast we all take.’
She has led him to a closed door. ‘Do they still call this the blue
chamber?’
‘Ah, your father has been here before,’ she says to Gregory.
‘He’s been everywhere,’ Gregory says. She turns. ‘See how you get on, gentlemen. By the way, she
will not answer to “Lady Mary”.’
It is a long room, it is almost empty of furniture, and the chill,
like a ghost’s ambassador, meets them on the threshold. The blue
tapestries have been taken down and the plaster walls are naked.
By an almost dead fire, Mary is sitting: huddled, tiny and pitifully young. Gregory whispers, ‘She looks like Malekin.’
Poor Malekin, she is a spirit girl; she eats at night, lives on
crumbs and apple peel. Sometimes, if you come down early and
are quiet on the stairs, you find her sitting in the ashes.
Mary glances up; surprisingly, her little face brightens. ‘Master
Cromwell.’ She gets to her feet, takes a step towards him and
almost stumbles, her feet entangled in the hem of her dress.
‘How long is it since I saw you at Windsor?’
‘I hardly know,’ he says gravely. ‘The years have been good to
you, madam.’
She giggles; she is now eighteen. She casts around her as if
bewildered for the stool on which she was sitting. ‘Gregory,’ he
says, and his son dives to catch the ex-princess, before she sits
down on empty air. Gregory does it as if it were a dance step; he
has his uses.
‘I am sorry to keep you standing. You might,’ she waves
vaguely, ‘sit down on that chest.’
‘I think we are strong enough to stand. Though I do not think
you are.’ He sees Gregory glance at him, as if he has never heard
this softened tone. ‘They do not make you sit alone, and by this
miserable fire, surely?’
‘The man who brings the wood will not give me my title of
princess.’
‘Do you have to speak to him?’
‘No. But it would be an evasion if I did not.’
That’s right, he thinks: make life as hard as possible for yourself. ‘Lady Shelton has told me about the difficulty in … the
dinner difficulty. Suppose I were to send you a physician?

‘We have one here. Or rather, the child has.’‘I could send a more useful one. He might give you a regimenfor your health, and lay it down that you were to take a largebreakfast, in your own room.’‘Meat?’ Mary says.‘In quantity.’‘But who would you send?’‘Dr Butts?’Her face softens. ‘I knew him at my court at Ludlow. When Iwas Princess of Wales. Which I still am. How is it I am put out ofthe succession, Master Cromwell? How is it lawful?’‘It is lawful if Parliament makes it so.’‘There is a law above Parliament. It is the law of God. AskBishop Fisher.’‘I find God’s purposes obscure, and God knows I find Fisherno fit elucidator. By contrast, I find the will of Parliament plain.’She bites her lip; now she will not look at him. ‘I have heardDr Butts is a heretic these days.’‘He believes as your father the king believes.’He waits. She turns, her grey eyes fixed on his face. ‘I will notcall my lord father a heretic.’‘Good. It is better that these traps are tested, first, by yourfriends.’‘I do not see how you can be my friend, if you are also friendto the person, I mean the Marquess of Pembroke.’ She will notgive Anne her royal title.‘That lady stands in a place where she has no need of friends,only of servants.’‘Pole says you are Satan. My cousin Reginald Pole. Who liesabroad at Genoa. He says that when you were born, you werelike any Christian soul, but that at some date the devil enteredinto you.’‘Did you know, Lady Mary, I came here when I was a boy, nineor ten? My uncle was a cook to Morton, and I was a poor snivel ling lad who bundled the hawthorn twigs at dawn to light theovens, and killed the chickens for the boiling house before the sunwas up.’ He speaks gravely. ‘Would you suppose the devil hadentered me by that date? Or was it earlier, around the time whenother people are baptised? You understand it is of interest to me.’Mary watches him, and she does it sideways; she still wears anold-style gable hood, and she seems to blink around it, like ahorse whose headcloth has slipped. He says softly, ‘I am notSatan. Your lord father is not a heretic.’‘And I am not a bastard, I suppose.’‘Indeed no.’ He repeats what he told Anne Shelton: ‘You wereconceived in good faith. Your parents thought they weremarried. That does not mean their marriage was good. You cansee the difference, I think?’She rubs her forefinger under her nose. ‘Yes, I can see thedifference. But in fact the marriage was good.’‘The queen will be coming to visit her daughter soon. If youwould simply greet her respectfully in the way you should greetyour father’s wife –’‘– except she is his concubine –’‘– then your father would take you back to court, you wouldhave everything you lack now, and the warmth and comfort ofsociety. Listen to me, I intend this for your good. The queen doesnot expect your friendship, only an outward show. Bite yourtongue and bob her a curtsey. It will be done in a heartbeat, andit will change everything. Make terms with her before her newchild is born. If she has a son, she will have no reason afterwardsto conciliate you.’‘She is frightened of me,’ Mary says, ‘and she will still befrightened, even if she has a son. She is afraid I will make amarriage, and my own sons will threaten her.’‘Does anyone talk to you of marriage?’A dry little laugh, incredulous. ‘I was a baby at the breastwhen I was married into France. Then to the Emperor, into France again, to the king, to his first son, to his second son, to hissons I have lost count of, and once again to the Emperor, or oneof his cousins. I have been contracted in marriage till I amexhausted. One day I shall really do it.’‘But you will not marry Pole.’She flinches, and he knows that it has been put to her: perhapsby her old governess Margaret Pole, perhaps by Chapuys, whostays up till dawn studying the tables of descent of the Englisharistocracy: strengthen her claim, put her beyond reproach,marry the half-Spanish Tudor back into the old Plantagenet line.He says, ‘I have seen Pole. I knew him before he went out of thekingdom. He is not the man for you. Whatever husband you get,he will need a strong sword arm. Pole is like an old wife sitting bythe fire, starting at Hob in the Corner and the Boneless Man. Hehas nothing but a little holy water in his veins, and they say heweeps copiously if his servant swats a fly.’She smiles: but she slaps a hand over her mouth like a gag.‘That’s right,’ he says. ‘You say nothing to anybody.’She says, from behind her fingers, ‘I can’t see to read.’‘What, they keep you short of candles?’‘No, I mean my sight is failing. All the time my head aches.’‘You cry a good deal?’ She nods. ‘Dr Butts will bring a remedy.Till then, have someone read to you.’‘They do. They read me Tyndale’s gospel. Do you know thatBishop Tunstall and Thomas More between them have identifiedtwo thousand errors in his so-called Testament? It is more heretical than the holy book of the Moslems.’Fighting talk. But he sees that tears are welling up. ‘All this canbe put right.’ She stumbles towards him and for a moment hethinks she will forget herself and lurch and sob against his ridingcoat. ‘The doctor will be here in a day. Now you shall have aproper fire, and your supper. Wherever you like it served.’‘Let me see my mother.’‘Just now the king cannot permit it. But that may change. ‘My father loves me. It is only she, it is only that wretch of awoman, who poisons his mind.’‘Lady Shelton would be kind, if you would let her.’‘What is she, to be kind or not kind? I shall survive AnneShelton, believe me. And her niece. And anyone else who setsthemselves up against my title. Let them do their worst. I amyoung. I will wait them out.’He takes his leave. Gregory follows him, his fascinated gazetrailing back to the girl who resumes her seat by the almost deadfire: who folds her hands, and begins the waiting, her expressionset.‘All that rabbit fur she is bundled up in,’ Gregory says. ‘Itlooks as if it has been nibbled.’‘She’s Henry’s daughter for sure.’‘Why, does someone say she is not?’He laughs. ‘I didn’t mean that. Imagine … if the old queen hadbeen persuaded into adultery, it would have been easy to be rid ofher, but how do you fault a woman who has never known but theone man?’ He checks himself: it is hard even for the king’s closestsupporters to remember that Katherine is supposed to have beenPrince Arthur’s wife. ‘Known two men, I should say.’ He sweepshis eyes over his son. ‘Mary never looked at you, Gregory.’‘Did you think she would?’‘Lady Bryan thinks you such a darling. Wouldn’t it be in ayoung woman’s nature?’‘I don’t think she has a nature.’‘Get somebody to mend the fire. I’ll order the supper. Theking can’t mean her to starve.’‘She likes you,’ Gregory says. ‘That’s strange.’He sees that his son is in earnest. ‘Is it impossible? My daughters liked me, I think. Poor little Grace, I am never sure if sheknew who I was.’‘She liked you when you made her the angel’s wings. She saidshe was always going to keep them.’ His son turns away; speaks as if he is afraid of him. ‘Rafe says you will be the second man inthe kingdom soon. He says you already are, except in title. Hesays the king will put you over the Lord Chancellor, and everybody. Over Norfolk, even.’‘Rafe is running ahead of himself. Listen, son, don’t talk aboutMary to anyone. Not even to Rafe.’‘Did I hear more than I should?’‘What do you think would happen if the king died tomorrow?’‘We should all be very sorry.’‘But who would rule?’Gregory nods towards Lady Bryan, towards the infant in hercradle. ‘Parliament says so. Or the queen’s child that is not bornyet.’‘But would that happen? In practice? An unborn child? Or adaughter not a year old? Anne as regent? It would suit theBoleyns, I grant you.’‘Then Fitzroy.’‘There is a Tudor who is better placed.’Gregory’s eyes turn back towards Lady Mary. ‘Exactly,’ hesays. ‘And look, Gregory, it’s all very well planning what youwill do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it’s no goodat all if you don’t have a plan for tomorrow.’After supper he sits talking to Lady Shelton. Lady Bryan hasgone to bed, then come down again to chivvy them along. ‘You’llbe tired in the morning!’‘Yes,’ Anne Shelton agrees, waving her away. ‘In the morningthere’ll be no doing anything with us. We’ll throw our breakfastson the floor.’They sit till the servants yawn off to another room, and thecandles burn down, and they retreat into the house, to smallerand warmer rooms, to talk some more. You have given Marygood advice, she says, I hope she heeds it, I fear there are hard times ahead for her. She talks about her brother Thomas Boleyn,the most selfish man I ever knew, it is no wonder Anne is sograsping, all she has ever heard from him is talk of money, andhow to gain a mean advantage over people, he would have soldthose girls naked at a Barbary slave market if he had thought hewould get a good price.He imagines himself surrounded by his scimitared retainers,placing a bid for Mary Boleyn; he smiles, and returns his attention to her aunt. She tells him Boleyn secrets; he tells her nosecrets, though she thinks he has.Gregory is asleep when he comes in, but he turns over and says,‘Dear father, where have you been, to bed with Lady Shelton?’These things happen: but not with Boleyns. ‘What strangedreams you must have. Lady Shelton has been thirty yearsmarried.’‘I thought I could have sat with Mary after supper,’ Gregorymurmurs. ‘If I didn’t say the wrong thing. But then she is sosneery. I couldn’t sit with such a sneery girl.’ He flounces over inthe feather bed, and falls asleep again.When Fisher comes to his senses and asks pardon, the old bishopbegs the king to consider that he is ill and infirm. The king indicates that the bill of attainder must take its course: but it is hishabit, he says, to grant mercy to those who admit their fault.The Maid is to be hanged. He says nothing of the chair ofhuman bones. He tells Henry she has stopped prophesying, andhopes that at Tyburn, with the noose around her neck, she willnot make a liar out of him.When his councillors kneel before the king, and beg thatThomas More’s name be taken out of the bill, Henry yields thepoint. Perhaps he has been waiting for this: to be persuaded.Anne is not present, or it might have gone otherwise.They get up and go out, dusting themselves. He thinks hehears the cardinal laughing at them, from some invisible part of the room. Audley’s dignity has not suffered, but the duke looksagitated; when he tried to get up, elderly knees had failed him,and he and Audley had lifted him by the elbows and set him onhis feet. ‘I thought I might be fixed there another hour,’ he says.‘Entreating and entreating him.’‘The joke is,’ he says to Audley, ‘More’s still being paid apension from the treasury. I suppose that had better stop.’‘He has a breathing space now. I pray to God he’ll see sense.Has he arranged his affairs?’‘Made over what he can to the children. So Roper tells me.’‘Oh, you lawyers!’ the duke says. ‘On the day I go down, whowill look after me?’Norfolk is sweating; he eases his pace, and Audley checks too,so they are dawdling along, and Cranmer comes behind like anafterthought. He turns back and takes his arm. He has been atevery sitting of Parliament: the bench of bishops, otherwise,conspicuously underpopulated.The Pope chooses this month, while he is rolling his great billsthrough Parliament, to give his judgment at last on QueenKatherine’s marriage – a judgment so long delayed that hethought Clement meant to die in his indecision. The originaldispensations, Clements finds, are sound; therefore the marriageis sound. The supporters of the Emperor let off fireworks in thestreets of Rome. Henry is contemptuous, sardonic. He expressesthese feelings by dancing. Anne can dance still, though her bellyshows; she must take the summer quietly. He remembers theking’s hand on Lizzie Seymour’s waist. Nothing came of that, theyoung woman is no fool. Now it is little Mary Shelton he iswhirling around, lifting her off her feet and tickling her andsqueezing her and making her breathless with compliments.These things mean nothing; he sees Anne lift up her chin andavert her gaze and lean back in her chair, making somemurmured comment, her expression arch; her veil brushing, forthe briefest moment, against the jacket of that grinning cur Francis Weston. It is clear Anne thinks Mary Shelton must betolerated, kept sweet even. It’s safest to keep the king amongcousins, if no sister is on hand. Where is Mary Boleyn? Down inthe country, perhaps longing like him for warmer weather.And the summer arrives, with no intermission for spring,promptly on a Monday morning, like a new servant with ashining face: 13 April. They are at Lambeth – Audley, himself,the archbishop – the sun shining strongly through the windows.He stands looking down at the palace gardens. This is how thebook Utopia begins: friends, talking in a garden. On the pathsbelow, Hugh Latimer and some of the king’s chaplains are playfighting, pulling each other around like schoolboys, Hughhanging around the necks of two of his clerical fellows so his feetswing off the floor. All they need is a football to make a properholiday of it. ‘Master More,’ he says, ‘why don’t you go out andenjoy the sunshine? And we’ll call for you again in half an hour,and put the oath to you again: and you’ll give us a differentanswer, yes?’He hears More’s joints snap as he stands. ‘Thomas Howardwent on his knees for you!’ he says. That seems like weeks ago.Late-night sittings and a fresh row every day have tired him, butsharpened his senses too, so he is aware that in the room behindhim Cranmer is working himself into a terrible anxiety, and hewants More out of the room before the dam breaks.‘I don’t know what you think a half-hour will do for me,’More says. His tone is easy, bantering. ‘Of course, it might dosomething for you.’More had asked to see a copy of the Act of Succession. NowAudley unrolls it; pointedly, he bends his head and beginsreading, though he has read it a dozen times. ‘Very well,’ Moresays. ‘But I trust I have made myself clear. I cannot swear, but Iwill not speak against your oath, and I will not try to dissuadeanyone else from it.’‘That is not enough. And you know it is not.’ More nods. He meanders towards the door, careering first intothe corner of the table, making Cranmer flinch, his arm dartingout to steady the ink. The door closes after him.‘So?’Audley rolls up the statute. Gently he taps it on the table,looking at the place where More had stood. Cranmer says,‘Look, this is my idea. What if we let him swear in secret? Heswears, but we offer not to tell anybody? Or if he cannot takethis oath, we ask him what oath he can take?’He laughs.‘That would hardly meet the king’s purpose,’ Audley sighs.Tap, tap, tap. ‘After all we did for him, and for Fisher. His nametaken out of the attainder, Fisher fined instead of locked up forlife, what more could they ask for? Our efforts flung back at us.’‘Oh well. Blessed are the peacemakers,’ he says. He wants tostrangle somebody.Cranmer says, ‘We will try again with More. At least, if herefuses, he should give his reasons.’He swears under his breath, turns from the window. ‘Weknow his reasons. All Europe knows them. He is against thedivorce. He does not believe the king can be head of the church.But will he say that? Not he. I know him. Do you know what Ihate? I hate to be part of this play, which is entirely devised byhim. I hate the time it will take that could be better spent, I hateit that minds could be better employed, I hate to see our livesgoing by, because depend upon it, we will all be feeling our agebefore this pageant is played out. And what I hate most of all isthat Master More sits in the audience and sniggers when I tripover my lines, for he has written all the parts. And written themthese many years.’Cranmer, like a waiting-boy, pours him a cup of wine, edgestowards him. ‘Here.’In the archbishop’s hand, the cup cannot help a sacramentalcharacter: not watered wine, but some equivocal mixture, this is my blood, this is like my blood, this is more or less somewhatlike my blood, do this in commemoration of me. He hands thecup back. The north Germans make a strong liquor, aquavitae: ashot of that would be more use. ‘Get More back,’ he says.A moment, and More stands in the doorway, sneezing gently.‘Come now,’ Audley says, smiling, ‘that’s not how a hero arrives.’‘I assure you, I intend in no wise to be a hero,’ More says.‘They have been cutting the grass.’ He pinches his nose onanother sneeze, and shambles towards them, hitching his gownon to his shoulder; he takes the chair placed for him. Before, hehad refused to sit down.‘That’s better,’ Audley says.

I knew the air would do yougood.’ He glances up, in invitation; but he, Cromwell, signals hewill stay where he is, leaning by the window. ‘I don’t know,’Audley says, good-humoured. ‘First one won’t sit. Then t’otherwon’t sit. Look,’ he pushes a piece of paper towards More, ‘theseare the names of the priests we have seen today, who have swornto the act, and set you an example. And you know all themembers of Parliament are conformable. So why not you?’More glances up, from under his eyebrows. ‘This is not acomfortable place for any of us.’‘More comfortable than where you’re going,’ he says.‘Not Hell,’ More says, smiling. ‘I trust not.’‘So if taking the oath would damn you, what about all these?’He launches himself forward from the wall. He snatches the listof names from Audley, rolls it up and slaps it on to More’s shoulder. ‘Are they all damned?’‘I cannot speak for their consciences, only for my own. Iknow that, if I took your oath, I should be damned.’‘There are those who would envy your insight,’ he says, ‘intothe workings of grace. But then, you and God have always beenon familiar terms, not so? I wonder how you dare. You talkabout your maker as if he were some neighbour you went fishingwith on a Sunday afternoon. Audley leans forward. ‘Let us be clear. You will not take theoath because your conscience advises you against it?’‘Yes.’‘Could you be a little more comprehensive in your answers?’‘No.’‘You object but you won’t say why?’‘Yes.’‘Is it the matter of the statute you object to, or the form of theoath, or the business of oath-taking in itself?’‘I would rather not say.’Cranmer ventures, ‘Where it is a question of conscience, theremust always be some doubt …’‘Oh, but this is no whim. I have made long and diligentconsultation with myself. And in this matter I hear the voice ofmy conscience clearly.’ He puts his head on one side, smiling. ‘Itis not so with you, my lord?’‘None the less, there must be some perplexity? For you mustask yourself, as you are a scholar and accustomed to controversy,to debate, how can so many learned men think on the one side,and I on the other? But one thing is certain, and it is that you owea natural obedience to your king, as every subject does. Also,when you entered the king’s council, long ago, you took a mostparticular oath, to obey him. So will not you do so?’ Cranmerblinks. ‘Set your doubts against that certainty, and swear.’Audley sits back in his chair. Eyes closed. As if to say, we’renot going to do better than that.More says, ‘When you were consecrated archbishop,appointed by the Pope, you swore your oath to Rome, but allday in your fist, they say, all through the ceremonies, you kept alittle paper folded up, saying that you took the oath underprotest. Is that not true? They say the paper was written byMaster Cromwell here.’Audley’s eyes snap open: he thinks More has shown himselfthe way out. But More’s face, smiling, is a mask of malice. ‘I would not be such a juggler,’ he says softly. ‘I would not treat theLord my God to such a puppet show, let alone the faithful ofEngland. You say you have the majority. I say I have it. You sayParliament is behind you, and I say all the angels and saints arebehind me, and all the company of the Christian dead, for asmany generations as there have been since the church of Christwas founded, one body, undivided –’‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ he says. ‘A lie is no less a lie because itis a thousand years old. Your undivided church has liked nothingbetter than persecuting its own members, burning them andhacking them apart when they stood by their own conscience,slashing their bellies open and feeding their guts to dogs. You callhistory to your aid, but what is history to you? It is a mirror thatflatters Thomas More. But I have another mirror, I hold it up andit shows a vain and dangerous man, and when I turn it about itshows a killer, for you will drag down with you God knows howmany, who will only have the suffering, and not your martyr’sgratification. You are not a simple soul, so don’t try to make thissimple. You know I have respected you? You know I haverespected you since I was a child? I would rather see my only sondead, I would rather see them cut off his head, than see yourefuse this oath, and give comfort to every enemy of England.’More looks up. For a fraction of a second, he meets his gaze,then turns away, coy. His low, amused murmur: he could kill himfor that alone. ‘Gregory is a goodly young man. Don’t wish himaway. If he has done badly, he will do better. I say the same of myown boy. What’s the use of him? But he is worth more than adebating point.’Cranmer, distressed, shakes his head. ‘This is no debatingpoint.’‘You speak of your son,’ he says. ‘What will happen to him?To your daughters?’‘I shall advise them to take the oath. I do not suppose them toshare my scruples.’ ‘That is not what I mean, and you know it. It is the next generation you are betraying. You want the Emperor’s foot on theirneck? You are no Englishman.’‘You are barely that yourself,’ More says. ‘Fight for theFrench, eh, bank for the Italians? You were scarcely grown up inthis realm before your boyhood transgressions drove you out ofit, you ran away to escape gaol or a noose. No, I tell you whatyou are, Cromwell, you are an Italian through and through, andyou have all their vices, all their passions.’ He sits back in hischair: one mirthless grunt of laughter. ‘This relentless bonhomieof yours. I knew it would wear out in the end. It is a coin that haschanged hands so often. And now the small silver is worn out,and we see the base metal.’Audley smirks. ‘You seem not to have noted Master Cromwell’sefforts at the Mint. His coinage is sound, or it is nothing.’The Chancellor cannot help it, that he is a smirking sort ofman; someone must keep calm. Cranmer is pale and sweating,and he can see the pulse galloping at More’s temple. He says, ‘Wecannot let you go home. Still, it seems to me that you are notyourself today, so rather than commit you to the Tower, wecould perhaps place you in the custody of the Abbot of Westminster … Would that seem suitable to you, my lord of Canterbury?’Cranmer nods. More says, ‘Master Cromwell, I should notmock you, should I? You have shown yourself my most especialand tender friend.’Audley nods to the guard at the door. More rises smoothly, asif the thought of custody has put a spring in his step; the effect isspoiled only by his usual grab at his garments, the scuffle as heshrugs himself together; and even then he seems to step backwards, and tread on his own feet. He thinks of Mary at Hatfield,rising from her stool and forgetting where she’d left it. Aftersome fashion, More is bundled out of the room. ‘Now he’s gotexactly what he wants,’ he says. He puts his palm against the glass of the window. He sees thesmudge it makes, against the old flawed glass. A bank of cloudhas come up over the river; the best of the day is behind them.Audley crosses the room to him. Hesitant, he stands at his shoulder. ‘If only More would indicate which part of the oath he findsobjectionable, it is possible something might be written to meethis objection.’‘You can forget that. If he indicates anything, he is donefor. Silence is his only hope, and it is not much of a hope atthat.’‘The king might accept some compromise,’ Cranmer says.‘But I fear the queen will not. And indeed,’ he says faintly, ‘whyshould she?’Audley puts a hand on his arm. ‘My dear Cromwell. Who canunderstand More? His friend Erasmus told him to keep awayfrom government, he told him he had not the stomach for it andhe was right. He should never have accepted the office I nowhold. He only did it to spite Wolsey, whom he hated.’Cranmer says, ‘He told him to keep away from theology too.Unless I am wrong?’‘How could you be? More publishes all his letters from hisfriends. Even when they reprove him, he makes a fine show ofhis humility and so turns it to his profit. He has lived in public.Every thought that passes through his mind he has committed topaper. He never kept anything private, till now.’Audley reaches past him, opens the window. A torrent ofbirdsong crests on the edge of the sill and spills into the room,the liquid, fluent notes of the storm-thrush.‘I suppose he’s writing an account of today,’ he says. ‘Andsending it out of the kingdom to be printed. Depend upon it, inthe eyes of Europe we will be the fools and the oppressors, andhe will be the poor victim with the better turn of phrase.’Audley pats his arm. He wants to console him. But who canbegin to do it? He is the inconsolable Master Cromwell: the unknowable, the inconstruable, the probably indefeasible MasterCromwell.Next day the king sends for him. He supposes it is to berate himfor failing to get More to take the oath. ‘Who will accompany meto this fiesta?’ he enquires. ‘Master Sadler?’As soon as he enters the king’s presence, Henry gestures witha peremptory sweep of his arm for his attendants to clear a space,and leave him alone in it. His face is like thunder. ‘Cromwell,have I not been a good lord to you?’He begins to talk … gracious, and more than gracious … ownsad unworthiness … if fallen short in any particular begs mostgracious pardon …He can do this all day. He learned it from Wolsey.Henry says, ‘Because my lord archbishop thinks I havenot done well by you. But,’ he says, in the tone of onemisunderstood, ‘I am a prince known for my munificence.’The whole thing seems to puzzle him. ‘You are to be MasterSecretary. Rewards shall follow. I do not understand whyI have not done this long ago. But tell me: when it was putto you, about the lords Cromwell that once were inEngland, you said you were nothing to them. Have you thoughtfurther?’‘To be honest, I never gave it another thought. I wouldn’t wearanother man’s coat, or bear his arms. He might rise up from hisgrave and take issue with me.’‘My lord Norfolk says you enjoy being low-born. He saysyou have devised it so, to torment him.’ Henry takes his arm. ‘Itwould seem convenient to me,’ he says, ‘that wherever we go –though we shall not go far this summer, considering the queen’scondition – you should have rooms provided for you next tomine, so we can speak whenever I need you; and where it ispossible, rooms that communicate directly, so that I need no gobetween.’ He smiles towards the courtiers; they wash back, like a tide. ‘God strike me,’ Henry says, ‘if I meant to neglect you. Iknow when I have a friend.’Outside, Rafe says, ‘God strike him … What terrible oaths heswears.’ He hugs his master. ‘This has been too long in coming.But listen, I have something to tell you when we get home.’‘Tell me now. Is it something good?’A gentleman comes forward and says, ‘Master Secretary, yourbarge is waiting to take you back to the city.’‘I should have a house on the river,’ he says. ‘Like More.’‘Oh, but leave Austin Friars? Think of the tennis court,’ Rafesays. ‘The gardens.’The king has made his preparations in secret. Gardiner’s armshave been burned off the paintwork. A flag with his coat of armsis raised beside the Tudor flag. He steps into his barge for the firsttime, and on the river, Rafe tells his news. The rocking of the boatbeneath them is imperceptible. The flags are limp; it is a stillmorning, misty and dappled, and where the light touches flesh orlinen or fresh leaves, there is a sheen like the sheen on an eggshell:the whole world luminous, its angles softened, its scent wateryand green.‘I have been married half a year,’ Rafe says, ‘and no oneknows, but you know now. I have married Helen Barre.’‘Oh, blood of Christ,’ he says. ‘Beneath my own roof. Whatdid you do that for?’Rafe sits mute while he says it all: she is a lovely nobody, apoor woman with no advantage to bring to you, you could havemarried an heiress. Wait till you tell your father! He will beoutraged, he will say I have not looked after your interests. ‘Andsuppose one day her husband turns up?’‘You told her she was free,’ Rafe says. He is trembling.‘Which of us is free?’He remembers what Helen had said: ‘So I could marry again?If anybody wanted me?’ He remembers how she had looked athim, a long look and full of meaning, only he did not read it. She might as well have turned somersaults, he would not havenoticed, his mind had moved elsewhere; that conversation wasover for him and he was on to something else. If I had wanted herfor myself, and taken her, who could have reproached me formarrying a penniless laundress, even a beggar off the street?People would have said, so that was what Cromwell wanted, abeauty with supple flesh; no wonder he disdained the widows ofthe city. He doesn’t need money, he doesn’t need connections, hecan afford to follow his appetites: he is Master Secretary now,and what next?He stares down into the water, now brown, now clear as thelight catches it, but always moving; the fish in its depths, theweeds, the drowned men with bony hands swimming. On themud and shingle there are cast up belt buckles, fragments ofglass, small warped coins with the kings’ faces washed away.Once when he was a boy he found a horseshoe. A horse in theriver? It seemed to him a very lucky find. But his father said, ifhorseshoes were lucky, boy, I would be the King of Cockaigne.First he goes out to the kitchens to tell Thurston the news. ‘Well,’the cook says easily, ‘as you’re doing the job anyway.’ A chuckle.‘Bishop Gardiner will be burning up inside. His giblets will besizzling in his own grease.’ He whisks a bloodied cloth from atray. ‘See these quails? You get more meat on a wasp.’‘Malmsey?’ he suggests. ‘Seethe them?’‘What, three dozen? Waste of good wine. I’ll do some for you,if you like. Come from Lord Lisle at Calais. When you write, tellhim if he sends another batch, we want them fatter or not at all.Will you remember?’‘I’ll make a note,’ he says gravely. ‘From now on I thought wemight have the council meet here sometimes, when the king isn’tsitting with us. We can give them dinner before.’‘Right.’ Thurston titters. ‘Norfolk could do with some fleshon his twiggy little legs.’

‘Thurston, you needn’t dirty your hands – you have enough
staff. You could put on a gold chain, and strut about.’
‘Is that what you’ll be doing?’ A wet poultry slap; then
Thurston looks up at him, wiping pluck from his fingers. ‘I think
I’d rather keep my hand in. In case things take a down-turn. Not
that I say they will. Remember the cardinal, though.’
He remembers Norfolk: tell him to go north, or I will come
where he is and tear him with my teeth.
May I substitute the word ‘bite’?
The saying comes to him, homo homini lupus, man is wolf to
man.
‘So,’ he says to Rafe after supper, ‘you’ve made your name,
Master Sadler. You’ll be held up as a prime example of how to
waste your connections. Fathers will point you out to their
sons.’
‘I couldn’t help it, sir.’
‘How, not help it?’
Rafe says, as dry as he can manage, ‘I am violently in love with
her.’
‘How does that feel? Is it like being violently angry?’
‘I suppose. Maybe. In that you feel more alive.’
‘I do not think I could feel any more alive than I am.’
He wonders if the cardinal was ever in love. But of course,
why did he doubt? The all-consuming passion of Wolsey for
Wolsey was hot enough to scorch all England. ‘Tell me, that
evening after the queen was crowned …’ He shakes his head,
turns over some papers on his desk: letters from the mayor of
Hull.
‘I will tell you anything you ask,’ Rafe says. ‘I cannot imagine
how I was not frank with you. But Helen, my wife, she thought
it was better to be secret.’
‘But now she is carrying a child, I suppose, so you must
declare yourselves? Rafe blushes.
‘That evening, when I came into Austin Friars looking for her,
to take her to Cranmer’s wife … and she came down,’ his eyes
move as if he were seeing it, ‘she came down without her cap, and
you after, with your hair sticking up, and you were angry with
me for taking her away …’
‘Well, yes,’ Rafe says. His hand creeps up and he flattens his
hair with his palm, as if that would help matters now. ‘They were
all gone out to the feasts. That was the first time I took her to bed,
but it was no blame. By then she had promised herself to me.’
He thinks, I am glad I have not brought up in my house a
young man without feeling, who only studies his advancement.
If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy;
under my protection, impulses are a thing Rafe can afford.
‘Look, Rafe, this is a – well, God knows, a folly but not a disaster. Tell your father my promotion in the world will ensure
yours. Of course, he will stamp and roar. It is what fathers are
for. He will shout, I rue the day I parted with my boy to the
debauched house of Cromwell. But we will bring him around. A
little and a little.’
Till now the boy has been standing; he subsides on to a stool,
hands on his head, head flung back; relief washes through his
whole body. Was he so afraid? Of me? ‘Look, when your father
sets eyes on Helen, he’ll understand, unless he’s …’ Unless he’s
what? You’d have to be dead and entombed not to notice: her
bold and beautiful body, her mild eyes. ‘We just need to get her
out of that canvas apron she goes around in, and dress her up as
Mistress Sadler. And of course you will want a house of your
own. I will help you there. I shall miss the little children, I have
grown fond of them, and Mercy too, we are all fond of them. If
you want this new one to be the first child in your house, we can
keep them here.’
‘It is good of you. But Helen would never part with them. It is
understood between us. So I shall never have any more children at Austin Friars, he
thinks. Well, not unless I take time out of the king’s business and
go wooing: not unless, when a woman speaks to me, I actually
listen. ‘What will reconcile your father, and you can tell him this,
is that from now on, when I am not with the king, you will be
with him. Master Wriothesley will tease the diplomats and keep
the ciphers, for it is sly work which will suit him, and Richard
will be here to head the household when I am absent and drive
my work forward, and you and I will attend on Henry, as sweet
as two nursemaids, and cater to his whims.’ He laughs. ‘You are
a gentleman born. He may promote you close to his person, to
the privy chamber. Which would be useful to me.’
‘I did not look for this to happen. I did not plan it.’ Rafe drops
his eyes. ‘I know I can never take Helen with me to court.’
‘Not as the world is now. And I do not think it will change in
our lifetimes. But look, you have made your choice. You must
never repent it.’
Rafe says, passionate, ‘How could I think to keep a secret
from you? You see everything, sir.’
‘Ah. Only up to a point.’
When Rafe has gone he takes out his evening’s work and
begins on it, methodical, tapping the papers into place. His bills
are passed but there is always another bill. When you are writing
laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like
spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and
like spells, they only work if people believe in them. If your law
exacts a penalty, you must be able to enforce it – on the rich as
well as the poor, the people on the Scottish borders and the
Welsh marches, the men of Cornwall as well as the men of Sussex
and Kent. He has written this oath, a test of loyalty to Henry,
and he means to swear the men of every burgh and village, and all
women of any consequence: widows with inheritances,
landowners. His people will be tramping the wold and heathland, pledging those who have barely heard of Anne Boleyn to uphold the succession of the child in her womb. If a man knows
the king is called Henry, swear him; never mind if he confuses
this king with his father or some Henry who came before. For
princes like other men fade from the memory of common
people; their features, on those coins he used to sift from the
river silt, were no more than a slight irregularity under his fingertips, and even when he had taken the coins home and scrubbed
them he could not say who they might be; is this, he asked,
Prince Caesar? Walter had said, let’s see; then he had flipped the
coin away from him in disgust, saying, it’s but a tinny farthing
from one of those kings who fought the French wars. Get out
there and earn, he’d said, never mind Prince Caesar; Caesar was
old when Adam was a lad.
He would chant, ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was
then the gentleman?’ Walter would chase him and hit him if he
could catch him: there’s a bloody rebel song for you, we know
what to do with rebels here. They are dug into shallow graves,
the Cornishmen who came up the country when he was a boy;
but there are always more Cornishmen. And beneath Cornwall,
beyond and beneath this whole realm of England, beneath the
sodden marches of Wales and the rough territory of the Scots
border, there is another landscape; there is a buried empire,
where he fears his commissioners cannot reach. Who will swear
the hobs and boggarts who live in the hedges and in hollow trees,
and the wild men who hide in the woods? Who will swear the
saints in their niches, and the spirits that cluster at holy wells
rustling like fallen leaves, and the miscarried infants dug into
unconsecrated ground: all those unseen dead who hover in
winter around forges and village hearths, trying to warm their
bare bones? For they too are his countrymen: the generations of
the uncounted dead, breathing through the living, stealing their
light from them, the bloodless ghosts of lord and knave, nun and
whore, the ghosts of priest and friar who feed on living England,
and suck the substance from the future. He stares down at the papers on his desk, but his thoughts are
far from here. My daughter Anne said, ‘I choose Rafe.’ He
lowers his head into his hands and closes his eyes; Anne
Cromwell stands before him, ten or eleven years old, broad and
resolute like a man at arms, her small eyes unblinking, sure of her
power to make her fate.
He rubs his eyes. Sifts his papers. What is this? A list. A meticulous clerk’s hand, legible but making scant sense.
Two carpets. One cut in pieces.
7 sheets. 2 pillows. 1 bolster.
2 platters, 4 dishes, 2 saucers.
One small basin, weight 12lbs @ 4d the pound; my Lady
Prioress has it, paid 4 shillings.
He turns the paper over, trying to find its origin. He sees that
he is looking at the inventory of Elizabeth Barton’s goods, left
behind at her nunnery. All this is forfeit to the king, the personal
property of a traitor: a piece of plank which serves as a table, three
pillowcases, two candlesticks, a coat valued at five shillings. An
old mantle has been given in charity to the youngest nun in her
convent. Another nun, a Dame Alice, has received a bed-cover.
He had said to More, prophecy didn’t make her rich. He
makes a memorandum to himself: ‘Dame Elizabeth Barton to
have money to fee the hangman.’ She has five days to live. The
last person she will see as she climbs the ladder is her executioner,
holding out his paw. If she cannot pay her way at the last, she
may suffer longer than she needs. She had imagined how long it
takes to burn, but not how long it takes to choke at the end of a
rope. In England there is no mercy for the poor. You pay for
everything, even a broken neck.
Thomas More’s family has taken the oath. He has seen them
himself, and Alice has left him in no doubt that she holds him
personally responsible for failing to talk her husband into conformity. ‘Ask him what in the name of God he’s about. Ask
him, is it clever, does he think it is, to leave his wife without
company, his son without advice, his daughters without protection, and all of us at the mercy of a man like Thomas Cromwell?’
‘That’s you told,’ Meg had murmured, with half a smile. Head
bowed, she had taken his hand between her own. ‘My father has
spoken very warmly of you. Of how you have been courteous to
him and how you have been vehement – which he accounts no
less a favour. He says he believes you understand him. As he
understands you.’
‘Meg? Surely you can look at me?’
Another face bowed under the weight of a gable hood: Meg
twitches her veils about her, as if she were out in a gale and they
would provide protection.
‘I can hold the king off for a day or two. I don’t believe he
wishes to see your father in the Tower, every moment he looks
for some sign of …’
‘Surrender?’
‘Support. And then … no honour would be too high.’
‘I doubt the king can offer the sort of honour he cares for,’
Will Roper says. ‘Unfortunately. Come on, Meg, let’s go home.
We need to get your mother on the river before she starts a
brawl.’ Roper holds out his hand. ‘We know you are not vengeful, sir. Though God knows, he has never been a friend to your
friends.’
‘There was a time you were a Bible man yourself.’
‘Men may change opinions.’
‘I agree entirely. Tell your father-in-law that.’
It was a sour note to part on. I shall not indulge More, he
thinks, or his family, in any illusion that they understand me.
How could that be, when my workings are hidden from myself?
He makes a note: Richard Cromwell to present himself to the
Abbot of Westminster, to escort Sir Thomas More, prisoner, to
the Tower. Why do I hesitate?
Let’s give him one more day.
It is 15 April 1534. He calls in a clerk to tidy and file his
papers, ready for tomorrow, and lingers by the fire, chatting; it is
midnight, and the candles are burned down. He takes one and
goes upstairs; Christophe, snoring, sprawls across the foot of his
wide and lonely bed. Dear God, he thinks, my life is ridiculous.
‘Wake up,’ he says, but in a whisper; when Christophe does not
respond, he lays hands on him and rolls him up and down, as if
he were the lid for a pie, till the boy wakes up, expostulating in
gutter French. ‘Oh by the hairy balls of Jesus.’ He blinks
violently. ‘My good master, I didn’t know it was you, I was
dreaming I was a pastry. Forgive me, I am completely drunk, we
have been celebrating the conjunction of the beautiful Helen
with the fortunate Rafe.’ He raises a forearm, curls up his fist,
makes a gesture of the utmost lewdness; his arm falls limp across
his body, his eyelids slide ineluctably towards his cheeks, and
with a final hiccup he subsides into sleep.
He hauls the boy to his pallet. Christophe is heavy now, a
rotund bulldog pup; he grunts, he mutters, but he does not wake
again.
He lays aside his clothes and says his prayers. He puts his head
on the pillow: 7 sheets 2 pillows 1 bolster. He sleeps as soon as the
candle is out. But his daughter Anne comes to him in a dream.
She holds up her left hand, sorrowful, to show him she wears no
wedding ring. She twists up her long hair and wraps it around her
neck like a noose.
Midsummer: women hurry to the queen’s apartments with clean
linen folded over their arms. Their faces are blank and shocked
and they walk so quickly you know not to stop them. Fires are
lit within the queen’s apartments to burn what has bled away. If
there is anything to bury, the women keep it a secret between
themselves. That night, huddled in a window embrasure, the sky lit by
stars like daggers, Henry will tell him, it is Katherine I blame. I
believe she ill-wishes me. The truth is her womb is diseased. All
those years she deceived me – she couldn’t carry a son, and she
and her doctors knew it. She claims she still loves me, but she is
destroying me. She comes in the night with her cold hands and
her cold heart, and lies between me and the woman I love. She
puts her hand on my member and her hand smells of the tomb.
The lords and ladies give the maids and midwives money, to
say what sex the child was, but the women give different answers
each time. Indeed, what would be worse: for Anne to have
conceived another girl, or to have conceived and miscarried a
boy?
Midsummer: bonfires are lit all over London, burning through
the short nights. Dragons stalk the streets, puffing out smoke
and clattering their mechanical wings.

IIThe Map of Christendom1534–1535

‘Do you want Audley’s post?’ Henry asks him. ‘It’s yours if yousay so.’The summer is over. The Emperor has not come. PopeClement is dead, and his judgments with him; the game is to playagain, and he has left the door open, just a chink, for the nextBishop of Rome to hold a conversation with England. Personally, he would slam it shut; but these are not personal matters.Now he thinks carefully: would it suit him to be Chancellor?It would be good to have a post in the legal hierarchy, so why notat the top? ‘I have no wish to disturb Audley. If Your Majesty issatisfied with him, I am too.’He remembers how the post tied Wolsey to London, when theking was elsewhere. The cardinal was active in the law courts; butwe have lawyers enough.Henry says, only tell me what you deem best. Abased, like alover, he cannot think of the best presents. He says, Cranmerbids me, listen to Cromwell, and if he needs a post, a tax, animpost, a measure in Parliament or a royal proclamation, give itto him.The post of Master of the Rolls is vacant. It is an ancient judicialoffice, it commands one of the kingdom’s great secretariats. Hispredecessors will be those men, bishops for the most part, eminent in learning: those who lie down on their tombs, with their virtuesin Latin engraved beneath. He is never more alive than when hetwists the stem of this ripe fruit and snaps it from the tree.‘You were also right about Cardinal Farnese,’ Henry says.‘Now we have a new Pope – Bishop of Rome, I should say – Ihave collected on my bets.’‘You see,’ he says, smiling. ‘Cranmer is right. Be advised by me.’The court is amused to hear how the Romans have celebratedPope Clement’s death. They have broken into his tomb, anddragged his naked body through the streets.The Master’s house in Chancery Lane is the most curious househe has ever entered. It smells of must, mould and tallow, andbehind its crooked facade it meanders back, a warren of littlespaces with low doorways; were our forebears all dwarves, orwere they not perfectly certain how to prop up a ceiling?This house was founded three hundred years ago, by theHenry that was then; he built it as a refuge for Jews who wishedto convert. If they took this step – advisable if they wished to bepreserved from violence – they would forfeit all their possessionsto the Crown. This being so, it was just that the Crown shouldhouse and feed them for their natural lives.Christophe runs ahead of him, into the depths of the house.‘Look!’ He trails his finger through a vast spider’s web.‘You’ve broken up her home, you heartless boy.’ He examinesAriane’s crumbling prey: a leg, a wing. ‘Let’s be gone, before shecomes back.’Some fifty years after Henry had endowed the house, all Jewswere expelled from the realm. Yet the refuge was never quiteempty; even today two women live here. I shall call on them, hesays.Christophe is tapping the walls and beams, for all the world asif he knew what he was looking for. ‘Wouldn’t you run,’ he sayswith relish, ‘if someone tapped back? ‘Oh, Jesus!’ Christophe crosses himself. ‘I expect a hundredmen have died here, Jews and Christians both.’Behind this wainscot, it is true, he can sense the tiny bones ofmice: a hundred generations, their articulated forefeet folded ineternal rest. Their descendants, thriving, he can smell in the air.This is a job for Marlinspike, he says, if we can catch him. Thecardinal’s cat is feral now, ranging at will through Londongardens, lured by the scent of carp from the ponds of city monasteries, tempted – for all he knows – across the river, to be snuggled to the bosoms of whores, slack breasts rubbed with rosepetals and ambergris; he imagines Marlinspike lolling, purring,declining to come home again. He says to Christophe, ‘I wonderhow I can be Master of the Rolls, if I am not master of a cat.’‘The Rolls have not paws to go walking.’ Christophe iskicking a skirting. ‘My foot go through it,’ he says, demonstrating.Will he leave the comforts of Austin Friars, for the tinywindows with their warped panes, the creaking passages, theancient draughts? ‘It will be a shorter journey to Westminster,’he says. His aim is bent there – Whitehall, Westminster and theriver, Master Secretary’s barge down to Greenwich or up toHampton Court. I shall be back at Austin Friars often, he says tohimself, almost every day. He is building a treasure room, arepository secure for any gold plate the king entrusts to him;whatever he deposits can quickly be turned into ready money.His treasure comes through the street on ordinary carts, toattract no attention, though there are vigilant outriders. Thechalices are fitted into soft leather cases made for them. Thebowls and dishes travel in canvas bags, interleaved with whitewoollen cloth at seven pence the yard. The jewels are swaddledin silk and packed into chests with new and shiny locks: and hehas the keys. There are great pearls which gleam wet from theocean, sapphires hot as India. There are jewels like the fruit youpick on a country afternoon: garnets like sloes, pink diamonds like rosehips. Alice says, ‘For a handful of these I would, myself,overthrow any queen in Christendom.’‘What a good thing the king hasn’t met you, Alice.’Jo says, ‘I would as soon have it in export licences. Or armycontracts. Someone will make a fortune in the Irish wars. Beans,flour, malt, horseflesh …’‘I shall see what I can do for you,’ he says.At Austin Friars he holds the lease for ninety-nine years. Hisgreat-grandchildren will have it: some unknown Londoners.When they look at the documents his name will be there. Hisarms will be carved over the doorways. He rests his hand on thebanister of the great staircase, looks up into the dust-mote glitterfrom a high window. When did I do this? At Hatfield, early inthe year: looking up, listening for the sounds of Morton’s household, long ago. If he himself went to Hatfield, must not ThomasMore have gone up too? Perhaps it was his light footstep heexpected, overhead?He starts to think again, about that fist that came out ofnowhere.His first idea had been, move clerks and papers to the Rolls,then Austin Friars will become a home again. But for whom? Hehas taken out Liz’s book of hours, and on the page where shekept the family listed he has made alterations, additions. Rafewill be moving out soon, to his new house in Hackney; andRichard is building in the same neighbourhood, with his wifeFrances. Alice is marrying his ward Thomas Rotherham. Herbrother Christopher is ordained and beneficed. Jo’s weddingclothes are ordered; she is snapped up by his friend John ap Rice,a lawyer, a scholar, a man he admires and on whose loyalty hecounts. I have done well for my folk, he thinks: not one of thempoor, or unhappy, or uncertain of their place in this uncertainworld. He hesitates, looking up into the light: now gold, nowblue as a cloud passes. Whoever will come downstairs and claimhim, must do it now. His daughter Anne with her thundering feet: Anne, he would say to her, couldn’t we have felt mufflersover those hooves of yours? Grace skimming down like dust,drawn into a spiral, a lively swirl … going nowhere, dispersing,gone.Liz, come down.But Liz keeps her silence; she neither stays nor goes. She isalways with him and not with him. He turns away. So this housewill become a place of business. As all his houses will becomeplaces of business. My home will be where my clerks and filesare; otherwise, my home will be with the king, where he is.Christophe says, ‘Now we are removed to the Rolls House, Ican tell you, cher maître, how I am happy that you did not leaveme behind. For in your absence they would call me snail brainand turnip head.’‘Alors …’ he takes a view of Christophe, ‘your head is indeedlike a turnip. Thank you for attracting my attention to it.’Installed at the Rolls, he takes a view of his situation: satisfactory. He has sold off his two Kent manors, but the king has givenhim one in Monmouthshire and he is buying another in Essex.He has his eye on plots in Hackney and Shoreditch, and is takingin leases on the properties around Austin Friars, which heintends to enfold in his building plans; and then, build a big wallaround the lot. He has surveys to hand of a manor in Bedfordshire, one in Lincolnshire, and two Essex properties he intendsto put in trust for Gregory. All this is small stuff. It’s nothing towhat he intends to have, or to what Henry will owe him.Meanwhile, his outgoings would frighten a lesser man. If theking wants something done, you have to be able to staff theenterprise and fund it. It is hard to keep up with the spending ofhis noble councillors, and yet there are a crew of them who liveat the pawn-shop and come to him month by month to patch theholes in their accounts. He knows when to let these debts run;there is more than one kind of currency in England. What hesenses is a great net is spreading about him, a web of favours done and favours received. Those who want access to the kingexpect to pay for it, and no one has better access than he. And atthe same time, the word is out: help Cromwell and he will helpyou. Be loyal, be diligent, be intelligent on his behalf; you willcome into a reward. Those who commit their service to him willbe promoted and protected. He is a good friend and master; thisis said of him everywhere. Otherwise, it is the usual abuse. Hisfather was a blacksmith, a crooked brewer, he was an Irishman,he was a criminal, he was a Jew, and he himself was just a wooltrader, he was a shearsman, and now he is a sorcerer: how else butby being a sorcerer would he get the reins of power in his hand?Chapuys writes to the Emperor about him; his early life remainsa mystery, but he is excellent company, and he keeps his household and retainers in magnificent style. He is a master oflanguage, Chapuys writes, a man of most eloquent address;though his French, he adds, is only assez bien.He thinks, it’s good enough for you. A nod and a wink will dofor you.These last months, the council has never been out of harness.A hard summer of negotiating has brought a treaty with theScots. But Ireland is in revolt. Only Dublin Castle itself and thetown of Waterford hold out for the king, while the rebel lords areoffering their services and their harbours to the Emperor’stroops. Among these isles it is the most wretched of territories,which does not pay the king what it costs him to garrison it; buthe cannot turn his back on it, for fear of who else might come in.Law is barely respected there, for the Irish think you can buy offmurder with money, and like the Welsh they cost out a man’s lifein cattle. The people are kept poor by imposts and seizures, byforfeitures and plain daylight robbery; the pious English abstainfrom meat on Wednesdays and Fridays, but the joke runs that theIrish are so godly they abstain every other day as well. Theirgreat lords are brutal and imperious men, treacherous and fickle,inveterate feuders, extortionists and hostage takers, and their allegiance to England they hold cheap, for they are loyal tonothing and prefer force of arms to law. As for the native chiefs,they recognise no natural limit to their claims. They say that ontheir land they own every ferny slope and lake, they own theheather, the meadow grass and the winds that riffle it; they ownevery beast and every man, and in times of scarcity they take thebread to feed their hunting dogs.No wonder they don’t want to be English. It would interrupttheir status as slave-owners. The Duke of Norfolk still has serfson his land, and even if the law courts move to free them the dukeexpects a fee from it. The king proposes to send Norfolk toIreland, but he says he’s spent enough futile months over thereand the only way he’ll go back is if they build a bridge so he canget home at the end of the week without getting his feet wet.He and Norfolk fight in the council chamber. The duke rants,and he sits back and folds his arms and watches him ranting. Youshould have sent young Fitzroy to Dublin, he tells the council.An apprentice king – make a show, stage a spectacle, throw somemoney about.Richard says to him, ‘Perhaps we should go to Ireland, sir.’‘I think my campaigning days are over.’‘I would like to be in arms. Every man should be a soldieronce in his life.’‘That is your grandfather speaking through you. Ap Evans thearcher. Concentrate for now on making a show in the tournaments.’Richard has proved a formidable man in the lists. It is more orless as Christophe says: biff, and they are flat. You would thinkthe sport was in his nephew’s blood, as it is in the blood of thelords who compete. He carries the Cromwell colours, and theking loves him for it, as he loves any man with flair and courageand physical strength. Increasingly, his bad leg forces him to sitwith the spectators. When he is in pain he is panicked, you cansee it in his eyes, and when he is recovering he is restless. Uncer tainty about his own state of health makes him less inclined forthe expense and trouble of organising a large tournament. Whenhe does run a course, with his experience, his weight and height,his superb horses and the steel of his temperament, he is likely towin. But to avoid accidents, he prefers to run against opponentshe knows.Henry says, ‘The Emperor, two or three years back when hewas in Germany, did he not have an evil humour in his thigh?They say the weather didn’t suit him. But then his dominionsoffer a change of climate. Whereas from one part of my kingdomto the next there is no change to be found.’‘Oh, I expect it’s worse in Dublin.’Henry looks out, hopeless, at the teeming rain. ‘And when Iride out the people shout at me. They rise up out of ditches, andshout about Katherine, how I should take her back. How wouldthey like it if I told them how to order their houses and wives andchildren?’Even when the weather clears the king’s fears do not diminish.‘She will escape and raise an army against me,’ he says. ‘Katherine. You do not know what she would do.’‘She told me she would not run.’‘And you think she never lies? I know she lies. I have proof ofit. She lied about her own virginity.’Oh, that, he thinks tiredly.It seems Henry doesn’t believe in the power of armed guards,in locks and keys. He thinks an angel recruited by the EmperorCharles will make them fall away. When he travels, he takes withhim a great iron lock, which is affixed to his chamber door by aservant who goes with him for the purpose. His food is tasted forpoison and his bed examined, last thing at night, for concealedweapons, such as needles; but even so, he is afraid he will bemurdered as he sleeps. Autumn: Thomas More is losing weight, a wiry little man emerging from what was never a superfluity of flesh. He lets AntonioBonvisi send him food in. ‘Not that you Lucchese know how toeat. I’d send it myself, but if he took ill, you know what peoplewould say. He likes dishes of eggs. I don’t know if he likes muchelse.’A sigh. ‘Milk puddings.’He smiles. These are carnivorous days. ‘No wonder he doesn’tthrive.’‘I’ve known him for forty years,’ Bonvisi says. ‘A lifetime,Tommaso. You wouldn’t hurt him, would you? Please assure me,if you can, that no one will hurt him.’‘Why do you think I’m no better than he is? Look, I have noneed to put him under pressure. His family and friends will do it.Won’t they?’‘Can’t you just leave him there? Forget him?’‘Of course. If the king allows.’He arranges for Meg Roper to visit. Father and daughter walkin the gardens, arm in arm. Sometimes he watches them from awindow in the Lord Lieutenant’s lodgings.By November, this policy has failed. Turned back, really, andbitten his hand, like a dog that out of kindness you pick up in thestreet. Meg says, ‘He has told me, and he has asked me to tell hisfriends, that he will have no more to do with oaths of any kind,and that if we hear he has sworn, we are to take it that he has beenforced, by ill-usage and rough handling. And if a paper is shownto the council, with his signature on it, we are to understand it isnot his hand.’More is now required to swear to the Act of Supremacy, an actwhich draws together all the powers and dignities assumed bythe king in the last two years. It doesn’t, as some say, make theking head of the church. It states that he is head of the church,and always has been. If people don’t like new ideas, let them haveold ones. If they want precedents, he has precedents. A second enactment, which will come into force in the new year, definesthe scope of treason.

It will be a treasonable offence to denyHenry’s titles or jurisdiction, to speak or write maliciouslyagainst him, to call him a heretic or a schismatic. This law willcatch the friars who spread panic and say the Spanish are landingwith the next tide to seize the throne for the Lady Mary. It willcatch the priests who in their sermons rant against the king’sauthority and say he is dragging his subjects after him to Hell. Isit much for a monarch to ask, that a subject keep a civil tongue inhis head?This is new, people say to him, this treason by words, and hesays, no, be assured, it is old. It casts into statute law what thejudges in their wisdom have already defined as common law. It isa measure for clarification. I am all for clarity.Upon More’s refusal of this second oath, a bill is brought inagainst him, forfeiting his goods to the Crown. He now has nohope of release; or rather, the hope lies in himself. It is his duty tovisit him, tell him he will no longer be allowed visitors, or strollsin the gardens.‘Nothing to see, this time of year.’ More casts a glance at thesky, a narrow strip of grey through the high window. ‘I can stillhave my books? Write letters?’‘For now.’‘And John Wood, he stays with me?’His servant. ‘Yes, of course.’‘He brings me a little news from time to time. They say thesweating sickness has broken out among the king’s troops inIreland. So late in the year, too.’Plague has also broken out; he’s not going to tell More that, orthat the whole Irish campaign is a debacle and a money sink andthat he wishes he had done as Richard said and gone out therehimself.‘The sweat takes off so many,’ More says, ‘and so swiftly, andin their prime too. And if you survive it, you are in no condition to fight the wild Irish, that’s for sure. I remember when Meg tookit, she nearly died. Have you had it? No, you’re never ill, areyou?’ He is chattering pointlessly, then he looks up. ‘Tell me,what do you hear from Antwerp? They say Tyndale is there.They say he lives straitly. He dare not stray beyond the Englishmerchants’ house. They say he is in prison, almost as I am.’It is true, or partly true. Tyndale has laboured in poverty andobscurity, and now his world has shrunk to a little room; whileoutside in the city, under the Emperor’s laws, printers arebranded and have their eyes put out, and brothers and sisters arekilled for their faith, the men beheaded, the women buried alive.More has a sticky web in Europe still, a web made of money; it ishis belief that his men have followed Tyndale these manymonths, but all his ingenuity, and Stephen Vaughan’s on the spot,have not been able to find out which of the Englishmen who passthrough that busy town are More’s agents. ‘Tyndale would besafer in London,’ More says. ‘Under yourself, the protector oferror. Now, look at Germany today. You see, Thomas, whereheresy leads us. It leads us to Münster, does it not?’Sectaries, anabaptists, have taken over the city of Münster.Your worst nightmares – when you wake, paralysed, and thinkyou have died – are bliss compared with this. The burgomastershave been ejected from the council, and thieves and lunatics havetaken their places, proclaiming that the end times have come andall must be rebaptised. Citizens who dissent have been drivenbeyond the walls, naked, to perish in the snow. Now the city isunder siege from its own prince-bishop, who intends to starve itout. The defenders, they say, are for the most part the womenand children left behind; they are held in dread by a tailor calledBockelson, who has crowned himself King of Jerusalem. It isrumoured that Bockelson’s friends have instituted polygamy, asrecommended in the Old Testament, and that some of thewomen have been hanged or drowned rather than submit to rapeunder cover of Abraham’s law. These prophets engage in daylight robbery, in the name of holding goods in common. It issaid they have seized the houses of the rich, burned their letters,slashed their pictures, mopped the floors with fine embroidery,and shredded the records of who owns what, so former times cannever come back.‘Utopia,’ he says. ‘Is it not?’‘I hear they are burning the books from the city libraries.Erasmus has gone into the flames. What kind of devils wouldburn the gentle Erasmus? But no doubt, no doubt,’ More nods,‘Münster will be restored to order. Philip the prince of Hesse,Luther’s friend, I have no doubt he will lend the good bishop hiscannon and his cannoneers, and one heretic will put downanother. The brethren fall to scrapping, do you see? Like rabiddogs drooling in the streets, who tear out each other’s entrailswhen they meet.’‘I tell you how Münster will end. Someone inside the city willsurrender it.’‘You think so? You look as if you would offer me odds. Butthere, I was never much of a gambler. And now the king has allmy money.’‘A man like that, a tailor, jumps up for a month or two –’‘A wool merchant, a blacksmith’s son, he jumps up for a yearor two …’He stands, picks up his cape: black wool, lambskin lining.More’s eyes gleam, ah, look, I have you on the run. Now hemurmurs, as if it were a supper party, must you go? Stay a little,can’t you? He lifts his chin. ‘So I shall not see Meg again?’The man’s tone, the emptiness, the loss: it goes straight to hisheart. He turns away, to keep his reply calm and trite. ‘You haveto say some words. That’s all.’‘Ahh. Just words.’‘And if you don’t want to say them I can put them to you inwriting. Sign your name and the king will be happy. I will sendmy barge to row you back to Chelsea, and tie up at the wharf at the end of your own garden – not much to see, as you say, at thistime of year, but think of the warm welcome within. Dame Aliceis waiting – Alice’s cooking, well, that alone would restore you;she is standing by your side watching you chew and the minuteyou wipe your mouth she picks you up in her arms and kissesaway the mutton fat, why husband I have missed you! She bearsyou off to her bedchamber, locks the door and drops the key inher pocket and pulls off your clothes till there you are in yourshirt and nothing but your little white legs sticking out – well,admit it, the woman is within her rights. Then next day – think ofit – you rise before dawn, shuffle to your familiar cell and flogyourself, call for your bread and water, and by eight o’clock backin your hair shirt, and over it your old woollen gown, thatblood-coloured one with the rent in … feet up on a stool, andyour only son bringing in your letters … snapping the seal onyour darling Erasmus … Then when you have read your letters,you can hobble out – let’s say it’s a sunny day – and look at yourcaged birds, and your little fox in its pen, and you can say, I wasa prisoner too, but no more, because Cromwell showed me Icould be free … Don’t you want it? Don’t you want to come outof this place?’‘You should write a play,’ More says wonderingly.He laughs. ‘Perhaps I shall.’‘It’s better than Chaucer. Words. Words. Just words.’He turns. He stares at More. It’s as if the light has changed. Awindow has opened on a strange country, where a cold windfrom childhood blows. ‘That book … Was it a dictionary?’More frowns. ‘I’m sorry?’‘I came up the stairs at Lambeth – give me a moment … I camerunning up the stairs, carrying your measure of small beer andyour wheaten loaf, to keep you from being hungry if you wokein the night. It was seven in the evening. You were reading, andwhen you looked up you held your hands over the book,’ hemakes the shape of wings, ‘as if you were protecting it. I asked you, Master More, what is in that great book? You said, words,words, just words.’More tilts his head. ‘This was when?’‘I believe I was seven.’‘Oh, nonsense,’ More says genially. ‘I didn’t know you whenyou were seven. Why, you were …’ he frowns, ‘you must havebeen … and I was …’‘About to go to Oxford. You don’t remember. But why wouldyou?’ He shrugs. ‘I thought you were laughing at me.’‘Oh, very probably I was,’ More says. ‘If indeed such a meetingtook place. Now witness these present days, when you come hereand laugh at me. Talking about Alice. And my little white legs.’‘I think it must have been a dictionary. You are sure you don’tremember? Well … my barge is waiting, and I don’t want to keepthe oars out in the cold.’‘The days are very long in here,’ More says. ‘The nights arelonger. My chest is bad. My breathing is tight.’‘Back to Chelsea then, Dr Butts will visit, tut-tut ThomasMore, what have you been doing to yourself? Hold your noseand drink off this foul mixture …’‘Sometimes I think I shall not see morning.’He opens the door. ‘Martin?’Martin is thirty, wiry, his fair hair under his cap already sparse:pleasant face with a crinkly smile. His native town is Colchester,his father a tailor, and he learned to read on Wycliffe’s gospel,which his father hid in their roof under the thatch. This is a newEngland; an England where Martin can dust the old text down,and show it to his neighbours. He has brothers, all of them Biblemen. His wife is just now confined with her third child, ‘crawledinto the straw,’ as he puts it. ‘Any news?’‘Not yet. But will you stand godfather? Thomas if it’s a boy, orif it’s a girl you name her, sir.’A touch of palms and a smile. ‘Grace,’ he says. A money gift isunderstood; the child’s start in life. He turns back to the sick man, who now slumps over his table. ‘Sir Thomas says at nighthis breath comes short. Bring him some bolsters, cushions, whatever you can find, prop him up to ease him. I want him to haveevery opportunity to live to rethink his position, show loyalty toour king, and go home. And now, bid you both good afternoon.’More looks up. ‘I want to write a letter.’‘Of course. You shall have ink and paper.’‘I want to write to Meg.’‘Then send her a human word.’More’s letters are beyond the human. They may be addressedto his daughter, but they are written for his friends in Europe toread.‘Cromwell …?’ More’s voice calls him back. ‘How is thequeen?’More is always correct, not like those who slip up and say‘Queen Katherine’. How is Anne? he means. But what could hetell him? He is on his way. He is out of the door. In the narrowwindow a blue dusk has replaced the grey.He had heard her voice, from the next room: low, relentless.Henry yelping in indignation. ‘Not me! Not me.’In the antechamber, Thomas Boleyn, Monseigneur, his narrowface rigid. Some Boleyn hangers-on, exchanging glances: FrancisWeston, Francis Bryan. In a corner, trying to make himselfinconspicuous, the lutenist Mark Smeaton; what’s he doing here?Not quite a family conclave: George Boleyn is in Paris, holdingtalks. An idea has been floated that the infant Elizabeth shouldmarry a son of France; the Boleyns really think this is going tohappen.‘Whatever can have occurred,’ he says, ‘to upset the queen?’His tone is astonished: as if she were the most placid of women.Weston says, ‘It’s Lady Carey, she is – that is to say she findsherself –’Bryan snorts. ‘With a bellyful of bastard.’

‘Ah. Didn’t you know?’ The shock around him is gratifying.
He shrugs. ‘I thought it a family matter.’
Bryan’s eyepatch winks at him, today a jaundiced yellow. ‘You
must watch her very closely, Cromwell.’
‘A matter in which I have failed,’ Boleyn says. ‘Evidently. She
claims the child’s father is William Stafford, and she has married
him. You know this Stafford, do you?’
‘Just about. Well,’ he says cheerfully, ‘shall we go in? Mark, we
are not setting this affair to music, so take yourself off to where
you can be useful.’
Only Henry Norris is attending the king: Jane Rochford, the
queen. Henry’s big face is white. ‘You blame me, madam, for
what I did before I even knew you.’
They have crowded in behind him. Henry says, ‘My lord
Wiltshire, can you not control either of your daughters?’
‘Cromwell knew,’ Bryan says. He snorts with laughter.
Monseigneur begins to talk, stumbling – he, Thomas Boleyn,
diplomat famed for his silver-tongued finesse. Anne cuts him off:
‘Why should she get a child by Stafford? I don’t believe it’s his.
Why would he agree to marry her, unless for ambition – well, he
has made a false move there, for he will never come to court
again, nor will she. She can crawl on her knees to me. I care not.
She can starve.’
If Anne were my wife, he thinks, I’d go out for the afternoon.
She looks haggard, and she cannot stay still; you wouldn’t trust
her near a sharp knife. ‘What to do?’ Norris whispers. Jane
Rochford is standing back against the tapestries, where nymphs
entwine themselves in trees; the hem of her skirt is dipped in
some fabulous stream, and her veil brushes a cloud, from which
a goddess peeps. She lifts her face; her look is one of sober
triumph.
I could have the archbishop fetched, he thinks. Anne wouldn’t
rage and stamp under his eyes. Now she has Norris by the sleeve;
what is she doing? ‘My sister has done this to spite me. She thinks she will sail about the court with her great belly, and pity
me and laugh at me, because I have lost my own child.’
‘I feel sure that, if the matter were to be viewed –’ her father
begins.
‘Get out!’ she says. ‘Leave me, and tell her – Mistress Stafford
– that she has forfeited any claim on my family. I don’t know her.
She is no longer a Boleyn.’
‘Wiltshire, go.’ Henry adds, in the tone in which a schoolboy
is promised a whipping, ‘I shall speak to you later.’
He says to the king, innocent, ‘Majesty, shall we do no business today?’ Henry laughs.
Lady Rochford runs beside him. He does not slow his pace so
she has to pick up her skirts. ‘Did you really know, Master Secretary? Or did you say that just to see their faces?’
‘You are too good for me. You see through all my ploys.’
‘Lucky I see through Lady Carey’s.’
‘It was you who detected her?’ Who else, he thinks? With her
husband George away she has no one to spy on.
Mary’s bed is strewn with silks – flame, orange, carnation – as
if a fire has broken out in the mattress. Across stools and a
window seat trail lawn smocks, entangled ribbons and unpaired
gloves. Are those the same green stockings she once revealed to
the knee, running full-tilt towards him on the day she proposed
marriage?
He stands in the doorway. ‘William Stafford, eh?’
She straightens up, her cheeks flushed, a velvet slipper in her
hand. Now the secret is out, she has loosened her bodice. Her
eyes slide past him. ‘Good girl, Jane, bring that here.’
‘Excuse me, Master.’ It is Jane Seymour, tiptoeing past him
with an armful of folded laundry. Then a boy after her, bumping
a yellow leather chest. ‘Just here, Mark.’
‘Behold me, Master Secretary,’ Smeaton says. ‘I’m making
myself useful.’ Jane kneels before the chest and swings it opens. ‘Cambric to
line it?’
‘Never mind cambric. Where’s my other shoe?’
‘Best be gone,’ Lady Rochford warns. ‘If Uncle Norfolk sees
you he’ll take a stick to you. Your royal sister thinks the king
has fathered your child. She says, why would it be William
Stafford?’
Mary snorts. ‘So much does she know. What would Anne
know of taking a man for himself? You can tell her he loves me.
You can tell her he cares for me and no one else does. No one else
in this world.’
He leans down and whispers, ‘Mistress Seymour, I did not
think you were a friend of Lady Carey.’
‘No one else will help her.’ She keeps her head down; the nape
of her neck flushes pink.
‘Those bed hangings are mine,’ Mary says. ‘Pull them down.’
Embroidered on them, he sees, are the arms of her husband Will
Carey, dead what – seven years now? ‘I can unpick the badges.’
Of course: what use are a dead man and his devices? ‘Where’s
my gilt basin, Rochford, have you got it?’ She gives the yellow
chest a kick; it is stamped all over with Anne’s falcon badge. ‘If
they see me with this, they’ll take it off me and tip my stuff in
the road.’
‘If you can wait an hour,’ he says, ‘I’ll send someone with a
chest for you.’
‘Will it be stamped Thomas Cromwell? God save me, I
haven’t an hour. I know what!’ She begins to haul the sheets off
the bed. ‘Make bundles!’
‘For shame,’ Jane Rochford says. ‘And run off like a servant
who’s stolen the silver? Besides, you won’t need these things
down in Kent. Stafford has a farm or something, hasn’t he? Some
little manor? Still, you can sell them. You’ll have to, I suppose.’
‘My sweet brother will help me when he returns from France.
He will not see me cut off. ‘I beg to differ. Lord Rochford will be sensible, as I am, that
you have disgraced all your kin.’
Mary turns on her, arm sweeping out like a cat flashing
claws. ‘This is better than your wedding day, Rochford. It’s
like getting a houseful of presents. You can’t love, you don’t
know what love is, and all you can do is envy those who do
know, and rejoice in their troubles. You are a wretched
unhappy woman whose husband loathes her, and I pity you,
and I pity my sister Anne, I would not change places with her,
I had rather be in the bed of an honest poor gentleman who
cares only for me than be like the queen and only able to keep
her man with old whore’s tricks – yes, I know it is so, he has
told Norris what she offers him, and it doesn’t conduce to
getting a child, I can tell you. And now she is afraid of every
woman at court – have you looked at her, have you looked at
her lately? Seven years she schemed to be queen, and God
protect us from answered prayers. She thought it would be like
her coronation every day.’ Mary, breathless, reaches into the
mill of her possessions and throws Jane Seymour a pair of
sleeves. ‘Take these, sweetheart, with my blessing. You have
the only kind heart at court.’
Jane Rochford, in departing, slams the door.
‘Let her go,’ Jane Seymour murmurs. ‘Forget her.’
‘Good riddance!’ Mary snaps. ‘I must be glad she didn’t pick
my things over, and offer me a price.’ In the silence, her words go
crash, flap, rattling around the room like trapped birds who
panic and shit down the walls: he has told Norris what she offers
him. By night, her ingenious proceedings. He is rephrasing it: as,
surely, one must? I’ll bet Norris is all ears. Christ alive, these
people! The boy Mark is standing, gapey-faced, behind the door.
‘Mark, if you stand there like a landed fish I shall have you
filleted and fried.’ The boy flees.
When Mistress Seymour has tied the bundles they look like
birds with broken wings. He takes them from her and reties them, not with silk tags but serviceable string. ‘Do you always
carry string, Master Secretary?’
Mary says, ‘Oh, my book of love poems! Shelton has it.’ She
pitches from the room.
‘She’ll need that,’ he says. ‘No poems down in Kent.’
‘Lady Rochford would tell her that sonnets don’t keep you
warm. Not,’ Jane says, ‘that I’ve ever had a sonnet. So I wouldn’t
really know.’
Liz, he thinks, take your dead hand off me. Do you grudge me
this one little girl, so small, so thin, so plain? He turns. ‘Jane –’
‘Master Secretary?’ She dips her knees and rolls sideways on
to the mattress; she sits up, drags her skirts from under her, finds
her footing: gripping the bedpost, she scrambles up, reaches
above her head, and begins to unhook the hangings.
‘Come down! I’ll do that. I’ll send a wagon after Mistress
Stafford. She can’t carry all she owns.’
‘I can do it. Master Secretary doesn’t deal with bed hangings.’
‘Master Secretary deals with everything. I’m surprised I don’t
make the king’s shirts.’
Jane sways gently above him. Her feet sink into the feathers.
‘Queen Katherine does. Still.’
‘The Dowager Katherine. Come down.’
She hops down to the rushes, giving her skirts a shake. ‘Even
now after all that has passed between them. She sent a new parcel
last week.’
‘I thought the king had forbidden her.’
‘Anne says they should be torn up and used for, well, you
know what for, in a jakes. He was angry. Possibly because he
doesn’t like the word “jakes”.’
‘No more does he.’ The king deprecates coarse language, and
not a few courtiers have been frozen out for telling some dirty
story. ‘Is it true what Mary says? That the queen is afraid?’
‘For now he is sighing over Mistress Shelton. Well, you know
that. You have observed. But surely that is harmless? A king is obliged to be gallant, till
he reaches the age when he puts on his long gown and sits by the
fire with his chaplains.’
‘Explain it to Anne, she doesn’t see it. She wanted to send
Shelton away. But her father and her brother would not have it.
Because the Sheltons are their cousins, so if Henry is going to
look elsewhere, they want it to be close to home. Incest is so
popular these days! Uncle Norfolk said – I mean, His Grace –’
‘It’s all right,’ he says, distracted, ‘I call him that too.’
Jane puts a hand over her mouth. It is a child’s hand, with tiny
gleaming nails. ‘I shall think of that when I am in the country and
have nothing to amuse me. And then does he say, dear nephew
Cromwell?’
‘You are leaving court?’ No doubt she has a husband in view:
some country husband.
‘I hope that when I have served another season I might be
released.’
Mary rips into the room, snarling. She juggles two embroidered cushions above the bulk of her child, a bulk which now
seems evident; she has a hand free for her gilt basin, in which is
her poetry book. She throws down the cushions, opens her fist
and scatters a handful of silver buttons, which rattle into the
basin like dice. ‘Shelton had these. Curse her for a magpie.’
‘It is not as if the queen likes me,’ Jane says. ‘And it is a long
time since I saw Wolf Hall.’
For the king’s new-year gift he has commissioned from Hans
a miniature on vellum, which shows Solomon on his
throne receiving Sheba. It is to be an allegory, he explains, of the
king receiving the fruits of the church and the homage of his
people.
Hans gives him a withering look. ‘I grasp the point.’
Hans prepares sketches. Solomon is seated in majesty. Sheba
stands before him, unseen face raised, her back to the onlooker. In your own mind,’ he says, ‘can you see her face, even though
it’s hidden?’
‘You pay for the back of her head, that’s what you get!’ Hans
rubs his forehead. He relents. ‘Not true. I can see her.’
‘See her like a woman you meet in the street?’
‘Not quite like that. More like someone you remember. Like
some woman you used to know when you were a child.’
They are seated in front of the tapestry the king gave him. The
painter’s eyes stray to it. ‘This woman on the wall. Wolsey had
her, Henry had her, now you.’
‘I assure you, she has no counterpart in real life.’ Well,
not unless Westminster has some very discreet and versatile
whore.
‘I know who she is.’ Hans nods emphatically, lips pressed
together, eyes bright and taunting, like a dog who steals a handkerchief so you will chase it. ‘They talk about it in Antwerp.
Why don’t you go over and claim her?’
‘She is married.’ He is taken aback, to think that his private
business is common talk.
‘You think she would not come away with you?’
‘It’s years. I have changed.’
‘Ja. Now you are rich.’
‘But what would be said of me, if I enticed away a woman
from her husband?’
Hans shrugs. They are so matter-of-fact, the Germans. More
says the Lutherans fornicate in church. ‘Besides,’ Hans says,
‘there is the matter of the –’
‘The what?’
Hans shrugs: nothing. ‘Nothing! You are going to hang me up
by my hands till I confess?’
‘I don’t do that. I only threaten to do it.’
‘I meant only,’ Hans says soothingly, ‘there is the matter of all
the other women who want to marry you. The wives of England,
they all keep secret books of whom they are going to have next when they have poisoned their husbands. And you are the top of
everyone’s list.’
In his idle moments – in the week there are two or three – he
has been picking through the records of the Rolls House.
Though the Jews are forbidden the realm, you cannot know
what human flotsam will be washed up by the tide of fortune,
and only once, for a single month in these three hundred years,
has the house been empty. He runs his eye over the accounts of
the successive wardens, and he handles, curious, the receipts for
their relief given by the dead inhabitants, written in Hebrew
characters. Some of them spent fifty years within these walls,
flinching from the Londoners outside. When he walks the
crooked passages, he feels their footsteps under his.
He goes to see the two who remain. They are silent and vigilant women of indeterminate age, and the names they go by are
Katherine Wheteley and Mary Cook.
‘What do you do?’ With your time, he means.
‘We say our prayers.’
They watch him for evidence of his intentions, good or ill.
Their faces say, we are two women with nothing left but our life
stories. Why should we part with them to you?
He sends them presents of fowl but he wonders if they eat
flesh from gentile hands. Towards Christmas, the prior of
Christchurch in Canterbury sends him twelve Kentish apples,
each one wrapped in grey linen, of a special kind that is good
with wine. He takes these apples to the converts, with wine he
has picked out. ‘In the year 1353,’ he says, ‘there was only one
person in the house. I am sorry to think she lived here without
company. Her last domicile was the city of Exeter, but I wonder
where before that? Her name was Claricia.’
‘We know nothing of her,’ says Katherine, or possibly Mary.
‘It would be surprising if we did.’ Her fingertip tests the apples.
Possibly she does not recognise their rarity, or that they are the
best present the prior could find. If you don’t like them, he says, or if you do, I have stewing pears. Somebody sent me five
hundred.
‘A man who meant to get himself noticed,’ says Katherine or
Mary, and the other says, ‘Five hundred pounds would have been
better.’
The women laugh, but their laughter is cold. He sees he will
never be on terms with them. He likes the name Claricia and he
wishes he had suggested it for the gaoler’s daughter. It is a name for
a woman you might dream of: one you could see straight through.
When the king’s new-year present is done Hans says, ‘It is the
first time I have made his portrait.’
‘You shall make another soon, I hope.’
Hans knows he has an English bible, a translation almost
ready. He puts a finger to his lips; too soon to talk about it, next
year maybe. ‘If you were to dedicate it to Henry,’ Hans says,
‘could he now refuse it? I will put him on the title page, displayed
in glory, head of the church.’ Hans paces, growls out a few
figures. He is thinking of paper and printer’s costs, estimating his
profits. Lucas Cranach draws title pages for Luther. ‘Those
pictures of Martin and his wife, he has sold prints by the basketful. And Cranach makes everybody look like a pig.’
True. Even those silvery nudes he paints have sweet pig-faces,
and labourer’s feet, and gristly ears. ‘But if I paint Henry, I must
flatter, I suppose. Show him how he was five years ago. Or ten.’
‘Stick to five. He will think you are mocking him.’
Hans draws his finger across his throat, buckles at the knees,
thrusts out his tongue like a man hanged; it seems he envisages
every method of execution.
‘An easy majesty would be called for,’ he says.
Hans beams. ‘I can do it by the yard.’
The end of the year brings cold and a green aqueous light,
washing across the Thames and the city. Letters fall to his desk
with a soft shuffle like great snowflakes: doctors of theology from Germany, ambassadors from France, Mary Boleyn from
her exile in Kent.
He breaks the seal. ‘Listen to this,’ he says to Richard. ‘Mary
wants money. She says, she knows she should not have been so
hasty. She says, love overcame reason.’
‘Love, was it?’
He reads. She does not regret for a minute she has taken on
William Stafford. She could have had, she says, other husbands,
with titles and wealth. But ‘if I were at liberty and might choose,
I ensure you, Master Secretary, I have tried so much honesty to be
in him, that I had rather beg my bread with him than to be the
greatest Queen christened.’
She dare not write to her sister the queen. Or her father or her
uncle or her brother. They are all so cruel. So she is writing to
him … He wonders, did Stafford lean over her shoulder, while
she was writing? Did she giggle and say, Thomas Cromwell, I
once raised his hopes.
Richard says, ‘I hardly remember how Mary and I were to be
married.’
‘That was in other days than these.’ And Richard is happy; see
how it has worked out; we can thrive without the Boleyns. But
Christendom was overturned for the Boleyn marriage, to put the
ginger pig in the cradle; what if it is true, what if Henry is sated,
what if the enterprise is cursed? ‘Get Wiltshire in.’
‘Here to the Rolls?’
‘He will come to the whistle.’
He will humiliate him – in his genial fashion – and make him
give Mary an annuity. The girl worked for him, on her back, and
now he must pension her. Richard will sit in the shadows and
take notes. It will remind Boleyn of the old days: the old days
now being approximately six, seven years back. Last week
Chapuys said to him, in this kingdom now you are all the cardinal was, and more.

It is Christmas Eve when Alice More comes to see him. There is
a thin sharp light, like the edge of an old knife, and in this light
Alice looks old.
He greets her like a princess, and leads her into one of the
chambers he has had repanelled and painted, where a great fire
leaps up a rebuilt chimney. The air smells of pine boughs. ‘You
keep the feast here?’ Alice has made an effort for him; pinned
her hair back fiercely, under a bonnet sewn with seed pearls.
‘Well! When I came here before it was a musty old place. My
husband used to say,’ and he notes the past tense, ‘my husband
used to say, lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning,
and when you come back that night he’ll be sitting on a plush
cushion eating larks’ tongues, and all the gaolers will owe him
money.’
‘Did he talk a lot about locking me in dungeons?’
‘It was only talk.’ She is uneasy. ‘I thought you might take me
to see the king. I know he’s always courteous to women, and
kind.’
He shakes his head. If he takes Alice to the king she will talk
about when he used to come to Chelsea and walk in the gardens.
She will upset him: agitate his mind, make him think about More,
which at present he doesn’t. ‘He is very busy with the French
envoys. He means to keep a large court this season. You will have
to trust my judgement.’
‘You have been good to us,’ she says, reluctant. ‘I ask myself
why. You always have some trick.’
‘Born tricky,’ he says. ‘Can’t help it. Alice, why is your
husband so stubborn?’
‘I no more comprehend him than I do the Blessed Trinity.’
‘Then what are we to do?’
‘I think he’d give the king his reasons. In his private ear. If the
king said beforehand that he would take away all penalties from
him.’
‘You mean, license him for treason? The king can’t do it.’

‘Holy Agnes! Thomas Cromwell, to tell the king what he can’t
do! I’ve seen a cock swagger in a barnyard, master, till a girl
comes one day and wrings his neck.’
‘It’s the law of the land. The custom of the country.’
‘I thought Henry was set over the law.’
‘We don’t live at Constantinople, Dame Alice. Though I say
nothing against the Turk. We cheer on the infidels, these days. As
long as they keep the Emperor’s hands tied.’
‘I don’t have much money left,’ she says. ‘I have to find fifteen
shillings every week for his keep. I worry he’ll be cold.’ She
sniffs. ‘Still, he could tell me so himself. He doesn’t write to me.
It’s all her, her, his darling Meg. She’s not my child. I wish his first
wife were here, to tell me if she was born the way she is now.
She’s close, you know. Keeps her own counsel, and his. She tells
me now he gave her his shirts to wash the blood out, that he wore
a shirt of hair beneath his linen. He did so when we were married
and I begged him to leave it off and I thought he had. But how
would I know? He slept alone and drew the bolt on his door. If
he had an itch I never knew it, he was perforce to scratch it
himself. Well, whatever, it was between the two of them, and me
no part of it.’
‘Alice –’
‘Don’t think I have no tenderness for him. He didn’t marry
me to live like a eunuch. We have had dealings, one time or
another.’ She blushes, more angry than shy. ‘And when that is
true, you cannot help feeling it, if a man might be cold, if he
might be hungry, his flesh being one with yours. You feel to him
as you might a child.’
‘Fetch him out, Alice, if it is within your power.’
‘More in yours than mine.’ She smiles sadly. ‘Is your little man
Gregory home for the season? I have sometimes said to my
husband, I wish Gregory Cromwell were my boy. I could bake
him in a sugar crust and eat him all up. Gregory comes home for Christmas, with a letter from Rowland
Lee saying he is a treasure and can come back to his household
any time. ‘So must I back,’ Gregory says, ‘or am I finished being
educated now?’
‘I have a scheme for the new year to improve your French.’
‘Rafe says I am being brought up like a prince.’
‘For now, you are all I have to practise on.’
‘My sweet father …’ Gregory picks up his little dog. He hugs
her, and nuzzles the fur at the back of her neck. He waits. ‘Rafe
and Richard say that when my education is sufficient you mean
to marry me to some old dowager with a great settlement and
black teeth, and she will wear me out with lechery and rule me
with her whims, and she will leave her estate away from the children she has and they will hate me and scheme against my life
and one morning I shall be dead in my bed.’
The spaniel swivels in his son’s arms, turns on him her mild,
round, wondering eyes. ‘They are making sport of you, Gregory.
If I knew such a woman, I would marry her myself.’
Gregory nods. ‘She would never rule you, sir. And I dare say
she would have a good deer park, which would be convenient to
hunt. And the children would be in fear of you, even if they were
men grown.’ He appears half-consoled. ‘What’s that map? Is it
the Indies?’
‘This is the Scots border,’ he says gently. ‘Harry Percy’s
country. Look, let me show you. These are parcels of his estates
he has given away to his creditors. We cannot let it continue,
because we can’t leave our borders to chance.’
‘They say he is sick.’
‘Sick, or mad.’ His tone is indifferent. ‘He has no heir, and he
and his wife never come together, so it is not likely he will. He
has fallen out with his brothers, and he owes a deal of money to
the king. So it would make sense to name the king his heir, would
it not? He will be brought to see it.’
Gregory looks stricken. ‘Take his earldom?’ ‘He can keep the style. We’ll give him something to live on.’
‘Is this because of the cardinal?’
Harry Percy stopped Wolsey at Cawood, as he was riding
south. He came in, keys in his hand, spattered with mud from the
road: my lord, I arrest you for high treason. Look at my face, the
cardinal said: I am not afraid of any man alive.
He shrugs. ‘Gregory, go and play. Take Bella and practise your
French with her; she came to me from Lady Lisle in Calais. I
won’t be long. I have to settle the kingdom’s bills.’
For Ireland at the next dispatch, brass cannon and iron shot,
rammers and charging ladles, serpentine powder and four
hundredweight of brimstone, five hundred yew bows and two
barrels of bowstrings, two hundred each of spades, shovels,
crowbars, pickaxes, horsehides, one hundred felling axes, one
thousand horseshoes, eight thousand nails. The goldsmith
Cornelys has not been paid for the cradle he made for the king’s
last child, the one that never saw the light; he claims for twenty
shillings disbursed to Hans for painting Adam and Eve on the
cradle, and he is owed for white satin, gold tassels and fringes,
and the silver for modelling the apples in the garden of Eden.
He is talking to people in Florence about hiring a hundred
arquebusiers for the Irish campaign. They don’t down tools, like
Englishmen do, if they have to fight in the woods or on rocky
terrain.
The king says, a lucky new year to you, Cromwell. And more
to follow. He thinks, luck has nothing to do with it. Of all his
presents, Henry is most pleased with the Queen of Sheba, and
with a unicorn’s horn, and a device to squeeze oranges with a
great gold ‘H’ on it.
Early in the new year the king gives him a title no one has ever
held before: Vicegerent in Spirituals, his deputy in church affairs.
Rumours that the religious houses will be put down have been
running about the kingdom for three years and more. Now he has the power to visit, inspect and reform monasteries; to close
them, if need be. There is hardly an abbey whose affairs he does
not know, by virtue of his training under the cardinal and the
letters that arrive day by day – some monks complaining of
abuses and scandals and their superiors’ disloyalty, others
seeking offices within their communities, assuring him that a
word in the right quarter will leave them forever in his debt.
He says to Chapuys, ‘Were you ever at the cathedral in
Chartres? You walk the labyrinth,’ he says, ‘set into the pavement, and it seems there is no sense in it. But if you follow it
faithfully it leads you straight to the centre. Straight to where
you should be.’
Officially, he and the ambassador are barely on speaking
terms. Unofficially, Chapuys sends him a vat of good olive oil.
He retaliates with capons. The ambassador himself arrives,
followed by a retainer carrying a parmesan cheese.
Chapuys looks doleful and chilly. ‘Your poor queen keeps the
season meagrely at Kimbolton. She is so afraid of the heretic
councillors about her husband that she has all her food cooked
over the fire in her own room. And Kimbolton is more like a
stable than a house.’
‘Nonsense,’ he says briskly. He hands the ambassador a
warming glass of spiced wine. ‘We only moved her from
Buckden because she complained it was damp. Kimbolton is a
very good house.’
‘Ah, you say that because it has thick walls and a wide moat.’
The scent of honey and cinnamon wafts into the room, logs
crackle in the hearth, the green boughs decorating his hall diffuse
their own resinous scent. ‘And the Princess Mary is ill.’
‘Oh, the Lady Mary is always ill.’
‘The more cause to care for her!’ But Chapuys softens his
tone. ‘If her mother could see her, it would be much comfort to
them both.’
‘Much comfort to their escape plans. You are a heartless man.’ Chapuys sips his wine. ‘You know,
the Emperor is ready to stand your friend.’ A pause, heavy with
significance; into which, the ambassador sighs. ‘There are
rumours that La Ana is distraught. That Henry is looking at
another lady.’
He takes a breath and begins to talk. Henry has no time for
other women. He is too busy counting his money. He is growing
very close, he doesn’t want Parliament to know his income. I
have difficulty getting him to part with anything for the universities, or to pay his builders, or even for the poor. He only thinks
of ordnance. Munitions. Shipbuilding. Beacons. Forts.
Chapuys turns down his mouth. He knows when he’s being
spun a line; if he didn’t, where would be the pleasure in it? ‘So I
am to tell my master, am I, that the King of England is so set on
war he has no time for love?’
‘There will be no war unless your master makes it. Which, with
the Turks at his heels, he scarcely has time to do. Oh, I know his
coffers are bottomless. The Emperor could ruin us all if he liked.’
He smiles. ‘But what good would that do the Emperor?’
The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms.
Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and
processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed
across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a
woman’s sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange
flower or rosewater; her hand pulling close the bed curtain, the
discreet sigh of flesh against flesh. The king – lord of generalities
– must now learn to labour over detail, led on by intelligent
greed. As his prudent father’s son, he knows all the families of
England and what they have. He has registered their holdings in
his head, down to the last watercourse and copse. Now the
church’s assets are to come under his control, he needs to know
their worth. The law of who owns what – the law generally – has
accreted a parasitic complexity – it is like a barnacled hull, a roof
slimy with moss. But there are lawyers enough, and how much ability does it require, to scrape away as you are directed?
Englishmen may be superstitious, they may be afraid of the
future, they may not know what England is; but the skills of
adding and subtraction are not scarce. Westminster has a thousand scratching pens, but Henry will need, he thinks, new men,
new structures, new thinking. Meanwhile he, Cromwell, puts his
commissioners on the road. Valor ecclesiasticus. I will do it in six
months, he says. Such an exercise has never been attempted
before, it is true, but he has already done much that no one else
has even dreamed of.
One day at the beginning of spring he comes back from Westminster chilled. His face aches, as if his bones lie open to the
weather, and nagging at his memory is that day when his father
mashed him into the cobblestones: his sideways view of Walter’s
boot. He wants to get back to Austin Friars, because he has had
stoves installed and the whole house is warm; the Chancery Lane
house is only warm in patches. Besides, he wants to be behind his
wall.
Richard says, ‘Your eighteen-hour days, sir, can’t continue for
ever.’
‘The cardinal did them.’
That night in his sleep he goes down to Kent. He is looking
over the accounts of Bayham Abbey, which is to be closed by
Wolsey’s command. The hostile faces of the monks, hovering
over him, cause him to swear and say to Rafe, pack these ledgers
and get them on the mule, we’ll examine them over our supper
and a glass of white burgundy. It is high summer. On horseback,
the mule plodding after them, they pick a route through the
monastery’s neglected vineyards, dipping with the track into a
sylvan dimness, into the bowl of broad-leaved green at the valley
bottom. He says to Rafe, we are like two caterpillars sliding
through a salad. They ride out again into a flood of sunlight, and
before them is the tower of Scotney Castle: its sandstone walls,
gold stippled with grey, shimmer above its moat. He wakes. He has dreamed of Kent, or been there? The ripple
of the sunshine is still on his skin. He calls for Christophe.
Nothing happens. He lies still. No one comes. It is early: no
sound from the house below. The shutters are closed, and the
stars are struggling to get in, working themselves with steel
points into the splinters of the wood. It occurs to him that he has
not really called for Christophe, only dreamed he has.
Gregory’s many tutors have presented him with a sheaf of
bills. The cardinal stands at the foot of his bed, wearing his full
pontificals. The cardinal becomes Christophe, opening the
shutter, moving against the light. ‘You have a fever, master?’
Surely he knows, one way or the other? Have I to do everything, know everything? ‘Oh, it is the Italian one,’ he says, as if
that discounts it.
‘So must we fetch an Italian doctor?’ Christophe sounds
dubious.
Rafe is here. The whole household is here. Charles Brandon is
here, who he thinks is real, till Morgan Williams comes in, who is
dead, and William Tyndale, who is in the English House at
Antwerp and dare not venture. On the stairs he can hear the efficient, deathly clip of his father’s steel-tipped boots.
Richard Cromwell roars, can we have quiet in here? When he
roars, he sounds Welsh; he thinks, on an ordinary day I would
never have noticed that. He closes his eyes. Ladies move behind
his lids: transparent like little lizards, lashing their tails. The
serpent queens of England, black-fanged and haughty, dragging
their blood-soaked linen and their crackling skirts. They kill and
eat their own children; this is well-known. They suck their
marrow before they are even born.
Someone asks him if he wants to confess.
‘Must I?’
‘Yes, sir, or you will be thought a sectary.’
But my sins are my strength, he thinks; the sins I have done,
that others have not even found the opportunity of committing. I hug them close; they’re mine. Besides, when I come to judgment I mean to come with a memorandum in my hand: I shall
say to my Maker, I have fifty items here, possibly more.
‘If I must confess, I’ll have Rowland.’
Bishop Lee is in Wales, they tell him. It might take days.
Dr Butts comes, with other doctors, a swarm of them sent by
the king. ‘It is a fever I got in Italy,’ he explains.
‘Let’s say it is.’ Butts frowns down at him.
‘If I am dying, get Gregory. I have things to tell him. But if I
am not, don’t interrupt his studies.’
‘Cromwell,’ Butts says, ‘I couldn’t kill you if I shot you
through with cannon. The sea would refuse you. A shipwreck
would wash you up.’
They talk about his heart; he overhears them. He feels they
should not: the book of my heart is a private book, it is not an
order book left on the counter for any passing clerk to scrawl in.
They give him a draught to swallow. Shortly afterwards he
returns to his ledgers. The lines keep slipping and the figures
intermingling and as soon as he has totalled up one column the
total unmakes itself and all sense is subtracted. But he keeps
trying and trying and adding and adding, until the poison or the
healing draught loosens its grip on him and he wakes. The pages
of the ledgers are still before his eyes. Butts thinks he is resting as
ordered, but in the privacy of his mind little stick figures with
arms and legs of ink climb out of the ledgers and walk about.
They are carrying firewood in for the kitchen range, but the
venison that is trussed to butcher turns back into deer, who rub
themselves in innocence on the bark of the trees. The songbirds
for the fricassee refeather themselves, hopping back on to the
branches not yet cut for firewood, and the honey for basting has
gone back to the bee, and the bee has gone back to the hive. He
can hear the noises of the house below, but it is some other
house, in another country: the chink of coins changing hands,
and the scrape of wooden chests over a stone floor. He can hear his own voice, telling some story in Tuscan, in Putney, in the
French of the camp and the Latin of a barbarian. Perhaps this is
Utopia? At the centre of that place, which is an island, there is a
place called Amaurotum, the City of Dreams.
He is tired out from the effort of deciphering the world. Tired
from the effort of smiling at the foe.
Thomas Avery comes up from the counting house. He sits by
him and holds his hand. Hugh Latimer comes and says psalms.
Cranmer comes and looks at him dubiously. Perhaps he is afraid
that he will ask, in his fever, how is your wife Grete these days?
Christophe says to him, ‘I wish your old master the cardinal
were here to comfort you, sir. He was a comfortable man.’
‘What do you know of him?’
‘I robbed him, sir. Did you not know? I robbed his gold plate.’
He struggles to sit up. ‘Christophe? You were the boy at
Compiègne?’
‘Certainly it was me. Up and down the stairs with buckets of
hot water for the bath, and each time a gold cup in the empty
bucket. I was sorry to rob him, for he was so gentil. “What, you
again with your pail, Fabrice?” You must understand, Fabrice
was my name in Compiègne. “Give this poor child his dinner,”
he said. I tasted apricots, which I never had before.’
‘But did they not catch you?’
‘My master was caught, a very great thief. They branded him.
There was a hue and cry. But you see, master, I was meant for
greater fortune.’
I remember, he says, I remember Calais, the alchemists, the
memory machine. ‘Guido Camillo is making it for François so he
will be the wisest king in the world, but the dolt will never learn
how to use it.’
This is fantasy, Butts says, the fever rising, but Christophe
says, no, I assure you, there is a man in Paris who has built a soul.
It is a building but it is alive. The whole of it is lined with little
shelves. On these shelves you find certain parchments, fragments of writing, they are in the nature of keys, which lead to a box
which contains a key which contains another key, but these keys
are not made of metal, or these enfolded boxes of wood.
Then what, frog-boy? someone says.
They are made of spirit. They are what we shall have left, if all
the books are burned. They will enable us to remember not only
the past, but the future, and to see all the forms and customs that
will one day inhabit the earth.
Butts says, he is burning up. He thinks of Little Bilney, how he
put a hand in the candle flame the night before he died, testing
out the pain. It seared his shrinking flesh; in the night he whimpered like a child and sucked his raw hand, and in the morning
the city councillors of Norwich dragged him to the pit where
their forefathers had burned Lollards. Even when his face was
burned away, they were still pushing into it the emblems and
banners of popery: their fabric singed and fringes alight, their
blank-eyed virgins cured like herring and curling in the smoke.
He asks, politely and in several languages, for water. Not too
much, Butts says, a little and a little. He has heard of an island
called Ormuz, the driest kingdom in the world, where there are
no trees and no crop but salt. Stand at its centre, and you look
over thirty miles in all directions of ashy plain: beyond which lies
the seashore, encrusted with pearls.
His daughter Grace comes by night. She makes her own light,
wrapped within her shining hair. She watches him, steady,
unblinking, till it is morning, and when they open the shutter
the stars are fading and the sun and moon hang together in a pale
sky.
A week passes. He is better and he wants work brought in but
the doctors forbid it. How will it go forward, he asks, and
Richard says, sir, you have trained us all and we are your disciples, you have made a thinking machine that marches forward as
if it were alive, you don’t need to be tending it every minute of
every day.

Still, Christophe says, they say le roi Henri is groaning as if he
were in pain himself: oh, where is Cremuel?
A message is brought. Henry has said, I am coming to visit.
It’s an Italian fever, so I am sure not to take it.
He can hardly believe it. Henry ran away from Anne when she
had the sweat: even at the height of his love for her.
He says, send Thurston up. They have been keeping him on a
low diet, invalid food like turkey. Now, he says, we are going to
plan – what? – a piglet, stuffed and roasted in the way I once saw
it done at a papal banquet. You will need chopped chicken, lardo,
and a goat’s liver, minced fine. You will need fennel seeds, marjoram, mint, ginger, butter, sugar, walnuts, hen’s eggs and some
saffron. Some people put in cheese but we don’t make the right
kind here in London, besides I myself think it is unnecessary. If
you’re in trouble about any of this send out to Bonvisi’s cook,
he’ll see you right.
He says, ‘Send next door to prior George, tell him to keep his
friars off the streets when the king comes, lest he reform them
too soon.’ It’s his feeling that the whole process should go
slowly, slowly, so people will see the justice of it; no need to spill
the religious out on to the streets. The friars who live at his gates
are a disgrace to their order, but they are good neighbours to
him. They have given up their refectory, and from their chamber
windows at night drifts the sound of merry supper parties. Any
day you can join a crowd of them drinking at the Well with Two
Buckets just outside his gates. The abbey church is more like a
market, and a fleshmarket too. The district is full of young bachelors from the Italian merchant houses, who are serving their
London year; he often entertains them, and when they leave his
table (drained of market information) he knows they make a
dash for the friars’ precincts, where enterprising London girls are
sheltering from the rain and waiting to make amiable terms. It is 17 April when the king makes his visit. At dawn there are
showers. By ten o’clock the air is mild as buttermilk. He is up and
in a chair, from which he rises. My dear Cromwell: Henry kisses
him firmly on both cheeks, takes him by the arms and (in case he
thinks he is the only strong man in the kingdom) he sits him back,
decisively, in his chair. ‘You sit and give me no argument,’ Henry
says. ‘Give me no argument for once, Master Secretary.’
The ladies of the house, Mercy and his sister-in-law Johane,
are decked out like Walsingham madonnas on a feast day. They
curtsey low, and Henry sways above them, informally attired,
jacket of silver brocade, vast gold chain across his chest, his fists
flashing with Indian emeralds. He has not wholly mastered the
family relationships, for which no one can blame him. ‘Master
Secretary’s sister?’ he says to Johane. ‘No, forgive me. I remember now that you lost your sister Bet at the same time my own
lovely sister died.’
It is such a simple, human sentence, coming from a king; at the
mention of their most recent loss, tears well into the eyes of the
two women, and Henry, turning to one, then the other, with a
careful forefinger dots them from their cheeks, and makes them
smile. The little brides Alice and Jo he whirls up into the air as if
they were butterflies, and kisses them on the mouth, saying he
wishes he had known them when he was a boy. The sad truth is,
do you not notice, Master Secretary, the older one gets, the lovelier the girls?
Then eighty will have its advantages, he says: every drab will
be a pearl. Mercy says to the king, as if talking to a neighbour,
give over, sir: you’re no age. Henry stretches out his arms and
displays himself before the company: ‘Forty-five in July.’
He notes the incredulous hush. It does the job. Henry is gratified.
Henry walks around and looks at all his paintings and asks
who the people are. He looks at Anselma, the Queen of Sheba,
on the wall. He makes them laugh by picking up Bella and talking to her in Honor Lisle’s atrocious French. ‘Lady Lisle sent
the queen a little creature even smaller. He tips his head to one
side and his ears prick up, as if to say, why are you speaking to
me? So she calls him Pourquoi.’ When he speaks of Anne his
voice drips uxorious sentiment: like clear honey. The women
smile, pleased to see their king set such an example. ‘You know
him, Cromwell, you have seen him on her arm. She takes him
everywhere. Sometimes,’ and now he nods judiciously, ‘I think
she loves him better than me. Yes, I am second to the dog.’
He sits smiling, no appetite, watching as Henry eats from the
silver dishes Hans has designed.
Henry speaks kindly to Richard, calling him cousin. He
signals for him to stand by while he talks to his councillor, and
for others to retreat a little way. What if King Francis this and
Francis that, should I cross the sea myself to patch together some
sort of deal, would you cross over yourself when you are on
your feet again? What if the Irish, what if the Scots, what if it all
gets out of hand and we have wars like in Germany and peasants
crowning themselves, what if these false prophets, what if
Charles overruns me and Katherine takes the field, she is of
mettlesome temper and the people love her, God knows why for
I do not.
If that happens, he says, I will be out of this chair and take the
field, my own sword in my hand.
When the king has enjoyed his dinner he sits by him and talks
softly about himself. The April day, fresh and showery, puts him
in mind of the day his father died. He talks of his childhood: I
lived at the palace at Eltham, I had a fool called Goose. When I
was seven the Cornish rebels came up, led by a giant, do you
remember that? My father sent me to the Tower to keep me safe.
I said, let me out, I want to fight! I wasn’t frightened of a giant
from the west, but I was frightened of my grandmother Margaret
Beaufort, because her face was like a death’s head, and her grip on
my wrist was like a skeleton’s grip. When we were young, he says, we were always told, your
grandmother gave birth to your lord father the king when she
was a little creature of thirteen years. Her past was like a sword
she held over us. What, Harry, are you laughing in Lent? When
I, at little more years than you, gave birth to the Tudor? What,
Harry, are you dancing, what, Harry, are you playing at ball?
Her life was all duty. She kept twelve paupers in her house at
Woking and once she made me kneel down with a basin and
wash their yellow feet, she’s lucky I didn’t throw up on them.
She used to start praying every morning at five. When she knelt
down at her prie-dieu she cried out from the pain in her knees.
And whenever there was a celebration, a wedding or a birth, a
pastime or an occasion of mirth, do you know what she did?
Every time? Without failing? She wept.
And with her, it was all Prince Arthur. Her shining light and
her creeping saint. ‘When I became king instead, she lay down
and died out of spite. And on her deathbed, do you know what
she told me?’ Henry snorts. ‘Obey Bishop Fisher in all things!
Pity she didn’t tell Fisher to obey me!’
When the king has left with his gentlemen, Johane comes to sit
with him. They talk quietly; though everything they say is fit to
be overheard. ‘Well, it came off sweetly.’
‘We must give the kitchen a present.’
‘The whole household did well. I am glad to have seen him.’
‘Is he what you hoped?’
‘I had not thought him so tender. I see why Katherine has
fought so hard for him. I mean, not just to be queen, which she
thinks is her right, but to have him for a husband. I would say he
is a man very apt to be loved.’
Alice bursts in. ‘Forty-five! I thought he was past that.’
‘You would have bedded him for a handful of garnets,’ Jo
sneers. ‘You said so.’
‘Well, you for export licences!’
‘Stop!’ he says. ‘You girls! If your husbands should hear you.’ ‘Our husbands know what we are,’ Jo says. ‘We are full of
ourselves, aren’t we? You don’t come to Austin Friars to look for
shy little maids. I wonder our uncle doesn’t arm us.’
‘Custom constrains me. Or I’d send you to Ireland.’
Johane watches them rampage away. When they are out of
earshot, she checks over her shoulder and murmurs, you will not
credit what I am going to say next.
‘Try me.’
‘Henry is frightened of you.’
He shakes his head. Who frightens the Lion of England?
‘Yes, I swear to you. You should have seen his face, when you
said you would take your sword in your hand.’
The Duke of Norfolk comes to visit him, clattering up from the
yard where his servants hold his plumed horse. ‘Liver, is it? My
liver’s shot to pieces. And these five years my muscles have been
wasting. Look at that!’ He sticks out a claw. ‘I’ve tried every
physician in the realm, but they don’t know what ails me. Yet
they never fail to send in their accounts.’
Norfolk, he knows it for a fact, would never pay anything so
mere as a doctor’s bill.
‘And the colics and the gripes,’ the duke says, ‘they make my
mortal life a Purgatory. Sometimes I’m at stool all night.’
‘Your Grace should take life more easily,’ Rafe says. Not bolt
your food, he means. Not race about in a lather like a post
horse.
‘I intend to, believe me. My niece makes it clear she wants
none of my company and none of my counsel. I’m for my house
at Kenninghall, and Henry can find me there if he wants me. God
restore you, Master Secretary. St Walter is good, I hear, if a job’s
getting too much for you. And St Ubald against the headache, he
does the trick for me.’ He gropes inside his jacket. ‘Brought you
a medal. Pope blessed it. Bishop of Rome, sorry.’ He drops it on
the table. ‘Thought you might not have one. He is out of the door. Rafe picks up the medal. ‘It’s probably
cursed.’
On the stairs they can hear the duke, his voice raised, plaintive: ‘I thought he was nearly dead! They told me he was nearly
dead …’
He says to Rafe, ‘Seen him off.’
Rafe grins. ‘Suffolk too.’
Henry has never remitted the fine of thirty thousand pounds
he imposed when Suffolk married his sister. From time to time he
remembers it, and this is one of those times; Brandon has had to
give up his lands in Oxfordshire and Berkshire to pay his debts,
and now he keeps small state down in the country.
He closes his eyes. It is bliss to think of: two dukes on the run
from him.
His neighbour Chapuys comes in. ‘I told my master in
dispatches that the king has visited you. My master is amazed
that the king would go to a private house, to one not even a lord.
But I told him, you should see the work he gets out of
Cromwell.’
‘He should have such a servant,’ he says. ‘But Eustache, you
are an old hypocrite, you know. You would dance on my grave.’
‘My dear Thomas, you are always the only opponent.’
Thomas Avery smuggles in to him Luca Pacioli’s book of chess
puzzles. He has soon done all the puzzles, and drawn out some
of his own on blank pages at the back. His letters are brought and
he reviews the latest round of disasters. They say that the tailor at
Münster, the King of Jerusalem with sixteen wives, has had a row
with one of them and cut her head off in the marketplace.
He re-emerges into the world. Knock him down and he will
get up. Death has called to inspect him, she has measured him,
breathed into his face: walked away again. He is a little leaner, his
clothes tell him; for a while he feels light, no longer grounded in
the world, each day buoyant with possibilities. The Boleyns
congratulate him heartily on his return to health, and so they should, for without him how would they be what they are now?
Cranmer, when they meet, keeps leaning forward to pat his
shoulder and squeeze his hand.
While he has been recovering, the king has cropped his hair.
He has done this to disguise his increasing baldness, though it
doesn’t, not at all. His loyal councillors have done the same, and
soon it becomes a mark of fellowship between them. ‘By God,
sir,’ Master Wriothesley says, ‘if I wasn’t frightened of you
before, I would be now.’
‘But Call-Me,’ he says, ‘you were frightened of me before.’
There is no change in Richard’s aspect; committed to the
tilting ground, he keeps his hair cropped to fit under a helmet.
The shorn Master Wriothesley looks more intelligent, if that
were possible, and Rafe more determined and alert. Richard
Riche has lost the vestiges of the boy he was. Suffolk’s huge face
has acquired a strange innocence. Monseigneur looks deceptively
ascetic. As for Norfolk, no one notices the change. ‘What sort of
hair did he have before?’ Rafe asks. Strips of iron-grey fortify his
scalp, as if laid out by a military engineer.
The fashion spreads into the country. When Rowland Lee next
pitches into the Rolls House, he thinks a cannonball is coming at
him. His son’s eyes look large and calm, a still golden colour.
Your mother would have wept over your baby curls, he says,
rubbing his head affectionately. Gregory says, ‘Would she? I
hardly remember her.’
As April goes out, four treacherous monks are put on trial. The
oath has been offered them repeatedly, and refused. It is a year
since the Maid was put to death. The king showed mercy to her
followers; he is not now so disposed. It is the Charterhouse of
London where the mischief originates, that austere house of men
who sleep on straw; it is where Thomas More tried his vocation,
before it was revealed to him that the world needed his talents.
He, Cromwell, has visited the house, as he has visited the recalci trant community at Syon. He has spoken gently, he has spoken
bluntly, he has threatened and cajoled; he has sent enlightened
clerics to argue the king’s case, and he has interviewed the disaffected members of the community and set them to work against
their brethren. It is all to no avail. Their response is, go away, go
away and leave me to my sanctified death.
If they think that they will maintain to the end the equanimity
of their prayer-lives, they are wrong, because the law demands
the full traitor’s penalty, the short spin in the wind and the
conscious public disembowelling, a brazier alight for human
entrails. It is the most horrible of all deaths, pain and rage and
humiliation swallowed to the dregs, the fear so great that the
strongest rebel is unmanned before the executioner with his
knife can do the job; before each one dies he watches his fellows
and, cut down from the rope, he crawls like an animal round and
round on the bloody boards.
Wiltshire and George Boleyn are to represent the king at the
spectacle, and Norfolk, who, grumbling, has been dragged up
from the country and told to prepare for an embassy to France.
Henry thinks of going himself to see the monks die, for the court
will wear masks, edging on their high-stepping horses among the
city officials and the ragged populace, who turn out by the
hundred to see any such show. But the king’s build makes it difficult to disguise him, and he fears there may be demonstrations in
favour of Katherine, still a favourite with the more verminous
portion of every crowd. Young Richmond shall stand in for me,
his father decides; one day he may have to defend, in battle, his
half-sister’s title, so it becomes him to learn the sights and sounds
of slaughter.
The boy comes to him at night, as the deaths are scheduled
next day: ‘Good Master Secretary, take my place.’
‘Will you take mine, at my morning meeting with the king?
Think of it like this,’ he says, firm and pleasant. ‘If you plead
sickness, or fall off your horse tomorrow or vomit in front of your father-in-law, he’ll never let you forget it. If you want him
to let you into your bride’s bed, prove yourself a man. Keep your
eyes on the duke, and pattern your conduct on his.’
But Norfolk himself comes to him, when it is over, and says,
Cromwell, I swear upon my life that one of the monks spoke
when his heart was out. Jesus, he called, Jesus save us, poor
Englishmen.
‘No, my lord. It is not possible he should do so.’
‘Do you know that for a fact?’
‘I know it from experience.’
The duke quails. Let him think it, that his past deeds have
included the pulling out of hearts. ‘I dare say you’re right.’
Norfolk crosses himself. ‘It must have been a voice from the
crowd.’
The night before the monks met their end, he had signed a pass
for Margaret Roper, the first in months. Surely, he thinks, for
Meg to be with her father when traitors are being led out to their
deaths; surely she will turn from her resolve, she will say to her
father, come now, the king is in his killing vein, you must take the
oath as I have done. Make a mental reservation, cross your
fingers behind your back; only ask for Cromwell or any officer
of the king, say the words, come home.
But his tactic fails. She and her father stood dry-eyed at a
window as the traitors were brought out, still in their habits, and
launched on their journey to Tyburn. I always forget, he thinks,
how More neither pities himself nor takes pity on others.
Because I would have protected my own girls from such a sight,
I think he would too. But he uses Meg to harden his resolve. If
she will not give way, he cannot; and she will not give way.
The following day he goes in to see More himself. The rain
splashes and hisses from the stones underfoot; walls and water
are indistinguishable, and around small corners a wind moans
like a winter wind. When he has struggled out of his wet outer layers he stands chatting to the turnkey Martin, getting the news
of his wife and new baby. How shall I find him, he asks at last
and Martin says, have you ever noticed how he has one shoulder
up and the other down?
It comes from overmuch writing, he says. One elbow on the
desk, the other shoulder dropped. Well, whatever, Martin says:
he looks like a little carved hunchback on a bench end.
More has grown his beard; he looks as one imagines the
prophets of Münster to look, though he would abhor the
comparison. ‘Master Secretary, how does the king take the news
from abroad? They say the Emperor’s troops are on the move.’
‘Yes, but to Tunis, I think.’ He casts a glance at the rain. ‘If you
were the Emperor, wouldn’t you pick Tunis, rather than
London? Look, I haven’t come to quarrel with you. Just to see if
you are comfortable.’
More says, ‘I hear you have sworn my fool, Henry Pattinson.’
He laughs.
‘Whereas the men who died yesterday had followed your
example, and refused to swear.’
‘Let me be clear. I am no example. I am just myself, alone. I say
nothing against the act. I say nothing against the men that made it.
I say nothing against the oath, or against any man that swears it.’
‘Ah, yes,’ he sits down on the chest where More keeps his
possessions, ‘but all this saying nothing, it won’t do for a jury,
you know. Should it come to a jury.’
‘You have come to threaten me.’
‘The Emperor’s feats of arms shorten the king’s temper. He
means to send you a commission, who will want a straight
answer as to his title.’
‘Oh I’m sure your friends will be too good for me. Lord
Audley? And Richard Riche? Listen. Ever since I came here I
have been preparing for my death, at your hands – yes, yours –
or at the hands of nature. All I require is peace and silence for my
prayers.’

‘You want to be a martyr.’
‘No, what I want is to go home. I am weak, Thomas. I am
weak as we all are. I want the king to take me as his servant, his
loving subject, as I have never ceased to be.’
‘I have never understood where the line is drawn, between
sacrifice and self-slaughter.’
‘Christ drew it.’
‘You don’t see anything wrong with the comparison?’
Silence. The loud, contentious, quality of More’s silence. It’s
bouncing off the walls. More says he loves England, and he fears
all England will be damned. He is offering some kind of bargain
to his God, his God who loves slaughter: ‘It is expedient that
one man shall die for the people.’ Well, I tell you, he says to
himself. Bargain all you like. Consign yourself to the hangman
if you must. The people don’t give a fourpenny fuck. Today is 5
May. In two days’ time the commission will visit you. We will
ask you to sit, you will decline. You will stand before us looking
like a desert father, and we snugly wrapped against the summer
chill. I will say what I say. You will say what you say. And
maybe I will concede you have won. I will walk away and leave
you, the king’s good subject if you say so, till your beard grows
down to your knees and the spiders weave webs across your
eyes.
Well, that’s his plan. Events overtake it. He says to Richard, has
any damnable bishop of Rome in the history of his pox-ridden
jurisdiction ever done anything so stupidly ill-timed as this?
Farnese has announced England is to have a new cardinal: Bishop
Fisher. Henry is enraged. He swears he will send Fisher’s head
across the sea to meet his hat.
The third of June: himself to the Tower, with Wiltshire for the
Boleyn interest, and Charles Brandon, looking as if he would as
soon be fishing. Riche to make notes; Audley to make jokes. It’s
wet again, and Brandon says, this must be the worst summer ever, eh? Yes, he says, good thing His Majesty isn’t superstitious.
They laugh: Suffolk, a little uncertainly.
Some said the world would end in 1533. Last year had its
adherents too. Why not this year? There is always somebody
ready to claim that these are the end times, and nominate his
neighbour as the Antichrist. The news from Münster is that the
skies are falling fast. The besiegers are demanding unconditional
surrender; the besieged are threatening mass suicide.
He leads the way. ‘Christ, what a place,’ Brandon says. Drips
are spoiling his hat. ‘Doesn’t it oppress you?’
‘Oh, we’re always here.’ Riche shrugs. ‘One thing or another.
Master Secretary is wanted at the Mint or the jewel house.’
Martin lets them in. More’s head jerks up as they enter.
‘It’s yes or no today,’ he says.
‘Not even good day and how do you.’ Somebody has given
More a comb for his beard. ‘Well, what do I hear from Antwerp?
Do I hear Tyndale is taken?’
‘That is not to the point,’ the Lord Chancellor says. ‘Answer
to the oath. Answer to the statute. Is it a lawfully made statute?’
‘They say he strayed outside and the Emperor’s soldiers have
seized him.’
He says coldly, ‘Had you prior knowledge?’
Tyndale has been, not just taken, but betrayed. Someone
tempted him out of his haven, and More knows who. He sees
himself, a second self, enacting another rainy morning just like
this: in which he crosses the room, hauls the prisoner to his feet,
beats out of him the name of his agent. ‘Now, Your Grace,’ he says
to Suffolk, ‘you are wearing a violent expression, pray be calm.’
Me? Brandon says. Audley laughs. More says, ‘Tyndale’s devil
will desert him now. The Emperor will burn him. And the king
will not lift a finger to save him, because Tyndale would not
support his new marriage.’
‘Perhaps you think he showed sense there?’ Riche says.
‘You must speak,’ Audley says, gently enough. More is agitated, words tumbling over each other. He is ignoring Audley, speaking to him, Cromwell. ‘You cannot compel me
to put myself in hazard. For if I had an opinion against your Act
of Supremacy, which I do not concede, then your oath would be
a two-edged sword. I must put my body in peril if I say no to it,
my soul if I say yes to it. Therefore I say nothing.’
‘When you interrogated men you called heretics, you did not
allow evasion. You compelled them to speak and racked if they
would not. If they were made to answer, why not you?’
‘The cases are not the same. When I compel an answer from a
heretic, I have the whole body of law behind me, the whole
might of Christendom. What I am threatened with here is one
particular law, one singular dispensation of recent make, recognised here but in no other country –’
He sees Riche make a note. He turns away. ‘The end is the
same. Fire for them. Axe for you.’
‘If the king grants you that mercy,’ Brandon says.
More quails; he curls up his fingers on the tabletop. He notices
this, detached. So that’s a way in. Put him in fear of the more
lingering death. Even as he thinks it, he knows he will not do it;
the notion is contaminating. ‘On numbers I suppose you have
me beat. But have you looked at a map lately? Christendom is
not what it was.’
Riche says, ‘Master Secretary, Fisher is more a man than this
prisoner before us, for Fisher dissents and takes the consequences.
Sir Thomas, I think you would be an overt traitor, if you dared.’
More says softly, ‘Not so. It is not for me to thrust myself on
God. It is for God to draw me to him.’
‘We take note of your obstinacy,’ Audley says. ‘We spare you
the methods you have used on others.’ He stands up. ‘It is the
king’s pleasure that we move to indictment and trial.’
‘In the name of God! What ill can I effect from this place? I do
nobody harm. I say none harm. I think none harm. If this be not
enough to keep a man alive He cuts in on him, incredulous. ‘You do nobody harm? What
about Bainham, you remember Bainham? You forfeited his
goods, committed his poor wife to prison, saw him racked with
your own eyes, you locked him in Bishop Stokesley’s cellar, you
had him back at your own house two days chained upright to a
post, you sent him again to Stokesley, saw him beaten and abused
for a week, and still your spite was not exhausted: you sent him
back to the Tower and had him racked again, so that finally his
body was so broken that they had to carry him in a chair when
they took him to Smithfield to be burned alive. And you say,
Thomas More, that you do no harm?’
Riche begins to gather More’s papers from the table. It is
suspected he has been passing letters to Fisher upstairs: which is
not a bad thing, if collusion in Fisher’s treason can be shown.
More drops his hand on them, fingers spread; then shrugs, and
yields them. ‘Have them if you must. You read all I write.’
He says, ‘Unless we hear soon of a change of heart, we must
take away your pen and papers. And your books. I will send
someone.’
More seems to shrink. He bites his lip. ‘If you must take them,
take them now.’
‘For shame,’ Suffolk says. ‘Do you take us for porters, Master
More?’
Anne says, ‘It is all about me.’ He bows. ‘When finally you have
out of More what troubles his singular conscience, you will find
that what is at the root of it is that he will not bend his knee to
my queenship.’
She is small and white and angry. Long fingers tip to tip,
bending each other back; eyes bright.
Before they go further, he has to recall to Henry last year’s
disaster; remind him that he cannot always have his own way,
just by asking for it. Last summer Lord Dacre, who is one of the
northern lords, was indicted for treason, accused of collusion with the Scots. Behind the accusation were the Clifford family,
Dacre’s hereditary enemies and rivals; behind them the Boleyns,
for Dacre had been outspoken in support of the former queen.
The stage was set in Westminster Hall, Norfolk presiding over
the court, as High Steward of the kingdom: and Dacre to be
judged, as was his right, by twenty fellow lords. And then …
mistakes were made. Possibly the whole thing was a miscalculation, an affair driven too fast and hard by the Boleyns. Possibly
he had erred in not taking charge of the prosecution himself; he
had thought it was best to stay in the background, as many titled
men have a spite against him for being who he is, and will take a
risk to work him displeasure. Or else Norfolk was the problem,
losing control of the court … Whatever the reason, the charges
were thrown out, to an outpouring by the king of astonishment
and rage. Dacre was taken straight back to the Tower by the
king’s guard, and he was sent in to strike some deal, which must,
he knew, end with Dacre broken. At his trial Dacre had talked
for seven hours, in his own defence; but he, Cromwell, can talk
for a week. Dacre had admitted to misprision of treason, a lesser
offence. He bought a royal pardon for £10,000. He was released
to go north again, a pauper.
But the queen was sick with frustration; she wanted an
example made. And affairs in France are not going her way; some
say that at the mention of her name, François sniggers. She
suspects, and she is right, that her man Cromwell is more interested in the friendship of the German princes than in an alliance
with France; but she has to pick her time for that quarrel, and she
says she will have no peace till Fisher is dead, till More is dead. So
now she circles the room, agitated, less than regal, and she keeps
veering towards Henry, touching his sleeve, touching his hand,
and he brushes her away, each time, as if she were a fly. He,
Cromwell, watches. They are not the same couple from day to
day: sometimes doting, sometimes chilly and distanced. The
billing and cooing, on the whole, is the more painful to watch. Fisher gives me no anxiety,’ he says, ‘his offence is clear. In
More’s case … morally, our cause is unimpeachable. No one is in
doubt of his loyalty to Rome and his hatred of Your Majesty’s
title as head of the church. Legally, however, our case is slender,
and More will use every legal, every procedural device open to
him. This is not going to be easy.’
Henry stirs into life. ‘Do I retain you for what is easy? Jesus
pity my simplicity, I have promoted you to a place in this
kingdom that no one, no one of your breeding has ever held in
the whole of the history of this realm.’ He drops his voice. ‘Do
you think it is for your personal beauty? The charm of your
presence? I keep you, Master Cromwell, because you are as
cunning as a bag of serpents. But do not be a viper in my bosom.
You know my decision. Execute it.’
As he leaves, he is conscious of the silence falling behind him.
Anne walking to the window. Henry staring at his feet.
So when Riche comes in, quivering with undisclosed secrets, he
is inclined to swat him like a fly; but then he takes hold of
himself, rubs his palms together instead: the merriest man in
London. ‘Well, Sir Purse, did you pack up the books? And how
was he?’
‘He drew the blind down. I asked him why, and he said, the
goods are taken away, so now I am closing the shop.’
He can hardly bear it, to think of More sitting in the dark.
‘Look, sir.’ Riche has a folded paper. ‘We had some conversation. I wrote it down.’
‘Talk me through it.’ He sits down. ‘I am More. You are
Riche.’ Riche stares at him. ‘Shall I close the shutter? Is this
better played out in the dark?’
‘I could not,’ Riche says, hesitant, ‘leave him without trying
once again –’
‘Quite. You have your way to make. But why would he talk to
you, if he would not talk to me? ‘Because he has no time for me. He thinks I don’t matter.’
‘And you Solicitor General,’ he says, mocking.
‘So we were putting cases.’
‘What, as if you were at Lincoln’s Inn after supper?’
‘To tell the truth I pitied him, sir. He craves conversation and
you know he rattles away. I said to him, suppose Parliament were
to pass an act saying that I, Richard Riche, were to be king.
Would you not take me for king? And he laughed.’
‘Well, you admit it is not likely.’
‘So I pressed him on it; he said, yes, majestic Richard, I so take
you, for Parliament can do it, and considering what they have
done already I should hardly be surprised if I woke up in the
reign of King Cromwell, for if a tailor can be King of Jerusalem I
suppose a lad from the smithy can be King of England.’
Riche pauses: has he given offence? He beams at him. ‘When I
am King Cromwell, you shall be a duke. So, to the point, Purse
… or isn’t there one?’
‘More said, well, you have put a case, I shall put you a higher
case. Suppose Parliament were to pass an act saying God should
not be God? I said, it would have no effect, for Parliament has
no power to do it. Then he said, aye, well, young man, at least
you recognise an absurdity. And there he stopped, and gave me
a look, as if to say, let us deal in the real world now. I said to him,
I will put you a middle case. You know our lord the king has
been named by Parliament head of the church. Why will you
not go with the vote, as you go with it when it makes me
monarch? And he said – as if he were instructing some child –
the cases are not alike. For one is a temporal jurisdiction, and
Parliament can do it. The other is a spiritual jurisdiction, and is
what Parliament cannot exercise, for the jurisdiction is out of
this realm.’
He stares at Riche. ‘Hang him for a papist,’ he says.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘We know he thinks it. He has never stated it.’

‘He said that a higher law governed this and all realms, and if
Parliament trespassed on God’s law …’
‘On the Pope’s law, he means – for he holds them the same, he
couldn’t deny that, could he? Why is he always examining his
conscience, if not to check day and night that it is in accord with
the church of Rome? That is his comfort, that is his guide. It
seems to me, if he plainly denies Parliament its capacity, he denies
the king his title. Which is treason. Still,’ he shrugs, ‘how far does
it take us? Can we show the denial was malicious? He will say, I
suppose, that it was just talk, to pass the time. That you were
putting cases, and that anything said in that wise cannot be held
against a man.’
‘A jury won’t understand that. They’ll take him to mean what
he said. After all, sir, he knew it wasn’t some students’ debate.’
‘True. You don’t hold those at the Tower.’
Riche offers the memorandum. ‘I have written it down faithfully to the best of my recollection.’
‘You don’t have a witness?’
‘They were in and out, packing up the books in a crate, he had
a lot of books. You cannot blame me for carelessness, sir, for how
was I to know he would talk to me at all?’
‘I don’t blame you.’ He sighs. ‘In fact, Purse, you are the apple
of my eye. You’ll stand behind this in court?’
Doubtful, Riche nods. ‘Tell me you will, Richard. Or tell me you
won’t. Let’s have it straight. Have the grace to say so now, if you
think your courage might fail. If we lose another trial, we can kiss
goodbye to our livelihoods. And all our work will be for nothing.’
‘You see, he couldn’t resist it, the chance to put me right,’
Riche says. ‘He will never let it drop, what I did as a boy. He uses
me to make his sermon on. Well, let him make his next sermon
on the block.’
The evening before Fisher is to die, he visits More. He takes a
strong guard with him, but he leaves them in the outer chamber and goes in alone. ‘I’ve got used to the blind drawn,’ More says,
almost cheerfully. ‘You don’t mind sitting in the twilight?’
‘You need not be afraid of the sun. There is none.’
‘Wolsey used to boast that he could change the weather.’ He
chuckles. ‘It’s good of you to visit me, Thomas, now that we have
no more to say. Or have we?’
‘The guards will come for Bishop Fisher early tomorrow. I am
afraid they will wake you.’
‘I should be a poor Christian if I could not keep vigil with
him.’ His smile has seeped away. ‘I hear the king has granted him
mercy as to the manner of his death.’
‘He being a very old man, and frail.’
More says, with tart pleasantness, ‘I’m doing my best, you
know. A man can only shrivel at his own rate.’
‘Listen.’ He reaches across the table, takes his hand, wrings it:
harder than he meant. My blacksmith’s grip, he thinks: he sees
More flinch, feels his fingers, the skin dry as paper over the
bones. ‘Listen. When you come before the court, throw yourself
at that instant on the king’s mercy.’
More says, wonderingly, ‘What good will that do me?’
‘He is not a cruel man. You know that.’
‘Do I? He used not to be. He had a sweet disposition. But then
he changed the company he kept.’
‘He is susceptible always to a plea for mercy. I do not say he
will let you live, the oath unsworn. But he may grant you the
same mercy as Fisher.’
‘It is not so important, what happens to the body. I have led in
some ways a blessed life. God has been good and not tested me.
Now he does I cannot fail him. I have been vigilant over my
heart, and I have not always liked what I have found there. If it
comes into the hands of the hangman at the last, so be it. It will
be in God’s hands soon enough.’
‘Will you think me sentimental, if I say I do not want to see
you butchered?’ No reply. ‘Are you not afraid of the pain?’ ‘Oh yes, I am very much afraid, I am not a bold and robust
man such as yourself, I cannot help but rehearse it in my mind.
But I will only feel it for a moment, and God will not let me
remember it afterwards.’
‘I am glad I am not like you.’
‘Undoubtedly. Or you would be sitting here.’
‘I mean, my mind fixed on the next world. I realise you see no
prospect of improving this one.’
‘And you do?’
Almost a flippant question. A handful of hail smacks itself
against the window. It startles them both; he gets up, restless.
He would rather know what’s outside, see the summer in its sad
blowing wreckage, than cower behind the blind and wonder
what the damage is. ‘I once had every hope,’ he says. ‘The world
corrupts me, I think. Or perhaps it’s just the weather. It pulls me
down and makes me think like you, that one should shrink
inside, down and down to a little point of light, preserving one’s
solitary soul like a flame under a glass. The spectacles of pain
and disgrace I see around me, the ignorance, the unthinking
vice, the poverty and the lack of hope, and oh, the rain – the rain
that falls on England and rots the grain, puts out the light in a
man’s eye and the light of learning too, for who can reason if
Oxford is a giant puddle and Cambridge is washing away downstream, and who will enforce the laws if the judges are swimming for their lives? Last week the people were rioting in York.
Why would they not, with wheat so scarce, and twice the price
of last year? I must stir up the justices to make examples, I
suppose, otherwise the whole of the north will be out with billhooks and pikes, and who will they slaughter but each other? I
truly believe I should be a better man if the weather were better.
I should be a better man if I lived in a commonwealth where the
sun shone and the citizens were rich and free. If only that were
true, Master More, you wouldn’t have to pray for me nearly as
hard as you do. ‘How you can talk,’ More says. Words, words, just words. ‘I
do, of course, pray for you. I pray with all my heart that you will
see that you are misled. When we meet in Heaven, as I hope we
will, all our differences will be forgot. But for now, we cannot
wish them away. Your task is to kill me. Mine is to keep alive. It
is my role and my duty. All I own is the ground I stand on, and
that ground is Thomas More. If you want it you will have to take
it from me. You cannot reasonably believe I will yield it.’
‘You will want pen and paper to write out your defence. I will
grant you that.’
‘You never give up trying, do you? No, Master Secretary, my
defence is up here,’ he taps his forehead, ‘where it will stay safe
from you.’
How strange the room is, how empty, without More’s books:
it is filling with shadows. ‘Martin, a candle,’ he calls.
‘Will you be here tomorrow? For the bishop?’
He nods. Though he will not witness the moment of Fisher’s
death. The protocol is that the spectators bow their knee and
doff their hats to mark the passing of the soul.
Martin brings a pricket candle. ‘Anything else?’ They pause
while he sets it down. When he is gone, they still pause: the prisoner sits hunched over, looking into the flame. How does he
know if More has begun on a silence, or on preparation for
speech? There is a silence which precedes speech, there is a silence
which is instead of speech. One need not break it with a statement, one can break it with a hesitation: if … as it may be … if it
were possible … He says, ‘I would have left you, you know. To
live out your life. To repent of your butcheries. If I were king.’
The light fades. It is as if the prisoner has withdrawn himself
from the room, leaving barely a shape where he should be. A
draught pulls at the candle flame. The bare table between them,
clear now of More’s driven scribblings, has taken on the aspect of
an altar; and what is an altar for, but a sacrifice? More breaks his
silence at last: ‘If, at the end and after I am tried, if the king does not grant, if the full rigour of the penalty … Thomas, how is it
done? You would think when a man’s belly were slashed open he
would die, with a great effusion of blood, but it seems it is not so
… Do they have some special implement, that they use to pith
him while he is alive?’
‘I am sorry you should think me expert.’
But had he not told Norfolk, as good as told him, that he had
pulled out a man’s heart?
He says, ‘It is the executioner’s mystery. It is kept secret, to
keep us in awe.’
‘Let me be killed cleanly. I ask nothing, but I ask that.’
Swaying on his stool, he is seized, between one heartbeat and the
next, in the grip of bodily agitation; he cries out, shudders from
head to foot. His hand beats, weakly, at the clean tabletop; and
when he leaves him, ‘Martin, go in, give him some wine’ – he is
still crying out, shuddering, beating the table.
The next time he sees him will be in Westminster Hall.
On the day of the trial, rivers breach their banks; the Thames
itself rises, bubbling like some river in Hell, and washes its
flotsam over the quays.
It’s England against Rome, he says. The living against the dead.
Norfolk will preside. He tells him how it will be. The early
counts in the indictment will be thrown out: they concern
sundry words spoken, at sundry times, about the act and the
oath, and More’s treasonable conspiracy with Fisher – letters
went between the two of them, but it seems those letters are now
destroyed. ‘Then on the fourth count, we will hear the evidence
of the Solicitor General. Now, Your Grace, this will divert More,
because he cannot see young Riche without working himself into
a fit about his derelictions when he was a boy –’ The duke raises
an eyebrow. ‘Drinking. Fighting. Women. Dice.’
Norfolk rubs his bristly chin. ‘I have noticed, a soft-looking
lad like that, he always does fight. To make a point, you see. Whereas we damned slab-faced old bruisers who are born with
our armour on, there’s no point we need to make.’
‘Quite,’ he says. ‘We are the most pacific of men. My lord,
please attend now. We don’t want another mistake like Dacre.
We would hardly survive it. The early counts will be thrown out.
At the next, the jury will look alert. And I have given you a handsome jury.’
More will face his peers; Londoners, the merchants of the
livery companies. They are experienced men, with all the city’s
prejudices. They have seen enough, as all Londoners have, of the
church’s rapacity and arrogance, and they do not take kindly to
being told they are unfit to read the scriptures in their own
tongue. They are men who know More and have known him
these twenty years. They know how he widowed Lucy Petyt.
They know how he wrecked Humphrey Monmouth’s business,
because Tyndale had been a guest at his house. They know how
he has set spies in their households, among their apprentices
whom they treat as sons, among the servants so familiar and
homely that they hear every night their master’s bedside prayers.
One name makes Audley hesitate: ‘John Parnell? It might be
taken wrong. You know he has been after More since he gave
judgment against him in Chancery –’
‘I know the case. More botched it, he didn’t read the papers,
too busy writing a billet-doux to Erasmus, or locking some poor
Christian soul in his stocks at Chelsea. What do you want,
Audley, do you want me to go to Wales for a jury, or up to
Cumberland, or somewhere they think better of More? I must
make do with London men, and unless I swear in a jury of newborns, I cannot wipe their memories clear.’
Audley shakes his head. ‘I don’t know, Cromwell.’
‘Oh, he’s a sharp fellow,’ the duke says. ‘When Wolsey came
down, I said, mark him, he’s a sharp fellow. You’d have to get up
early in the morning to be ahead of him.

The night before the trial, as he is going through his papers at the
Austin Friars, a head appears around the door: a little, narrow
London head with a close-shaved skull and a raw young face.
‘Dick Purser. Come in.’
Dick Purser looks around the room. He keeps the snarling
bandogs who guard the house by night, and he has not been in
here before. ‘Come here and sit. Don’t be afraid.’ He pours him
some wine, into a thin Venetian glass that was the cardinal’s. ‘Try
this. Wiltshire sent it to me, I don’t make much of it myself.’
Dick takes the glass and juggles it dangerously. The liquid is
pale as straw or summer light. He takes a gulp. ‘Sir, can I come in
your train to the trial?’
‘It still smarts, does it?’ Dick Purser was the boy whom More
had whipped before the household at Chelsea, for saying the
host was a piece of bread. He was a child then, he is not much
more now; when he first came to Austin Friars, they say he cried
in his sleep. ‘Get yourself a livery coat,’ he says. ‘And remember
to wash your hands and face in the morning. I don’t want you to
disgrace me.’
It is the word ‘disgrace’ that works on the child. ‘I hardly
minded the pain,’ he says. ‘We have all had, saving you sir, as
much if not worse from our fathers.’
‘True,’ he says. ‘My father beat me as if I were a sheet of metal.’
‘It was that he laid my flesh bare. And the women looking on.
Dame Alice. The young girls. I thought one of them might speak
up for me, but when they saw me unbreached, I only disgusted
them. It made them laugh. While the fellow was whipping me,
they were laughing.’
In stories it is always the young girls, innocent girls, who stay
the hand of the man with the rod or the axe. But we seem to have
strayed into a different story: a child’s thin buttocks dimpling
against the cold, his skinny little balls, his shy prick shrinking to
a button, while the ladies of the house giggle and the menservants
jeer, and the thin weals spring out against his skin and bleed. ‘It’s done and forgotten now. Don’t cry.’ He comes from
behind his desk. Dick Purser drops his shorn head against his
shoulder and bawls, in shame, in relief, in triumph that soon he
will have outlived his tormentor. More did John Purser to death,
he harassed him for owning German books; he holds the boy,
feeling the jump of his pulses, his stiff sinews, the ropes of his
muscles, and makes sounds of comfort, as he did to his children
when they were small, or as he does to a spaniel whose tail has
been trodden on. Comfort is often, he finds, imparted at the cost
of a flea or two.
‘I will follow you to the death,’ the boy declares. His arms, fists
clenched, grip his master: knuckles knead his spine. He sniffs. ‘I
think I will look well in a livery coat. What time do we start?’
Early. With his staff he is at Westminster Hall before anybody
else, vigilant for last-minute hitches. The court convenes around
him, and when More is brought in, the hall is visibly shocked at
his appearance. The Tower was never known to do a man good,
but he startles them, with his lean person and his ragged white
beard, looking more like a man of seventy than what he is.
Audley whispers, ‘He looks as if he has been badly handled.’
‘And he says I never miss a trick.’
‘Well, my conscience is clear,’ the Lord Chancellor says
breezily. ‘He has had every consideration.’
John Parnell gives him a nod. Richard Riche, both court official
and witness, gives him a smile. Audley asks for a seat for the prisoner, but More twitches to the edge of it: keyed up, combative.
He glances around to check that someone is taking notes for
him.
Words, words, just words.
He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn’t
remember me. You never even saw me coming.

III
To Wolf Hall
July 1535

On the evening of More’s death the weather clears, and he walks
in the garden with Rafe and Richard. The sun shows itself, a
silver haze between rags of cloud. The beaten-down herb beds
are scentless, and a skittish wind pulls at their clothes, hitting the
backs of their necks and then veering round to slap their faces.
Rafe says, it’s like being at sea. They walk at either side of him,
and close, as if there were danger from whales, pirates and
mermaids.
It is five days since the trial. Since then, much business has
supervened, but they cannot help rehearse its events, trading with
each other the pictures in their heads: the Attorney General
jotting a last note on the indictment; More sniggering when some
clerk made a slip in his Latin; the cold smooth faces of the
Boleyns, father and son, on the judges’ bench. More had never
raised his voice; he sat in the chair Audley had provided for him,
attentive, head tipped a little to the left, picking away at his sleeve.
So Riche’s surprise, when More turned on him, was visible; he
had taken a step backwards, and steadied himself against a table.
‘I know you of old, Riche, why would I open my mind to you?’
More on his feet, his voice dripping contempt. ‘I have known
you since your youth, a gamer and a dicer, of no commendable
fame even in your own house …’

‘By St Julian!’ Justice Fitzjames had exclaimed; it was ever his
oath. Under his breath, to him, Cromwell: ‘Will he gain by this?’
The jury had not liked it: you never know what a jury will
like. They took More’s sudden animation to be shock and guilt,
at being confronted with his own words. For sure, they all knew
Riche’s reputation. But are not drinking, dice and fighting more
natural in a young man, on the whole, than fasting, beads and
self-flagellation? It was Norfolk who had cut in on More’s tirade,
his voice dry: ‘Leave aside the man’s character. What do you say
to the matter in hand? Did you speak those words?’
Was it then that Master More played a trick too many? He had
pulled himself together, hauling his slipping gown on to his
shoulder; the gown secured, he paused, he calmed himself, he
fitted one fist into the other. ‘I did not say what Riche alleges. Or
if I did say it, I did not mean it with malice, therefore I am clear
under the statute.’
He had watched an expression of derision cross Parnell’s face.
There’s nothing harder than a London burgess who thinks he’s
being played for a fool. Audley or any of the lawyers could have
put the jury right: it’s just how we lawyers argue. But they don’t
want a lawyer’s argument, they want the truth: did you say it, or
didn’t you? George Boleyn leans forward: can the prisoner let us
have his own version of the conversation?
More turns, smiling, as if to say, a good point there, young
master George. ‘I made no note of it. I had no writing materials,
you see. They had already taken them away. For if you remember, my lord Rochford, that was the very reason Riche came to
me, to remove from me the means of recording.’
And he had paused again, and looked at the jury as if expecting applause; they looked back, faces like stones.
Was that the turning point? They might have trusted More,
being, as he was, Lord Chancellor at one time, and Purse, as
everybody knows, such a waster. You never know what a jury
will think: though when he had convened them, of course he had been persuasive. He had spoken with them that morning: I do
not know what his defence is, but I don’t hold out hope we will
be finished by noon; I hope you all had a good breakfast? When
you retire, you must take your time, of course, but if you are
gone more than twenty minutes by my reckoning, I will come in
to see how you do. To put you out of doubt, on any points of
law.
Fifteen minutes was all they needed.
Now, this evening in the garden, July 6, the feast day of St
Godelva (a blameless young wife of Bruges, whose evil husband
drowned her in a pond), he looks up at the sky, feeling a change
in the air, a damp drift like autumn. The interlude of feeble sun is
over. Clouds drift and mass in towers and battlements, blowing
in from Essex, stacking up over the city, driven by the wind
across the broad soaked fields, across the sodden pastureland and
swollen rivers, across the dripping forests of the west and out
over the sea to Ireland. Richard retrieves his hat from a lavender
bed and knocks droplets from it, swearing softly. A spatter of
rain hits their faces. ‘Time to go in. I have letters to write.’
‘You’ll not work till all hours tonight.’
‘No, grandfather Rafe. I shall get my bread and milk and say
my Ave and so to bed. Can I take my dog up with me?’
‘Indeed no! And have you scampering overhead till all hours?’
It’s true he didn’t sleep much last night. It had come to him,
the wrong side of midnight, that More was no doubt asleep
himself, not knowing that it was his last night on earth. It is not
usual, till the morning, to prepare the condemned man; so, he
had thought, any vigil I keep for him, I keep alone.
They hurry in; the wind bangs a door behind them. Rafe takes
his arm. He says, this silence of More’s, it was never really
silence, was it? It was loud with his treason; it was quibbling as
far as quibbles would serve him, it was demurs and cavils, suave
ambiguities. It was fear of plain words, or the assertion that plain
words pervert themselves; More’s dictionary, against our
dictionary. You can have a silence full of words. A lute retains, in
its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, in its strings, holds a
concord. A shrivelled petal can hold its scent, a prayer can rattle
with curses; an empty house, when the owners have gone out,
can still be loud with ghosts.
Someone – probably not Christophe – has put on his desk a
shining silver pot of cornflowers. The dusky blueness at the base
of the crinkled petals reminds him of this morning’s light; a late
dawn for July, a sullen sky. By five, the Lieutenant of the Tower
would have gone in to More.
Down below, he can hear a stream of messengers coming into
the courtyard. There is much to do, tidying up after the dead
man; after all, he thinks, I did it when I was a child, picking up
after Morton’s young gentlemen, and this is the last time I will
have to do it; he pictures himself in the dawn, slopping into a
leather jug the dregs of small beer, squeezing up the candle ends
to take to the chandlery for remelting.
He can hear voices in the hall; never mind them: he returns to
his letters. The Abbot of Rewley solicits a vacant post for his
friend. The Mayor of York writes to him about weirs and fish
traps; the Humber is running clean and sweet, he reads, so is the
Ouse. A letter from Lord Lisle in Calais, relating some muddled
tale of self-justification: he said, then I said, so he said.
Thomas More stands before him, more solid in death than he
was in life. Perhaps he will always be here now: so agile of mind
and so adamant, as he appeared in his final hour before the
court. Audley was so happy with the guilty verdict that he
began to pass sentence without asking the prisoner if he had
anything to say; Fitzjames had to reach out and slap his arm,
and More himself rose from his chair to halt him. He had much
to say, and his voice was lively, his tone biting, and his eyes, his
gestures, hardly those of a condemned man, in law already
dead. But there was nothing new in it: not new anyway to him. I
follow my conscience, More said, you must follow yours. My
conscience satisfies me – and now I will speech plainly – that
your statute is faulty (and Norfolk roars at him) and that your
authority baseless (Norfolk roars again: ‘Now we see your
malice plain’). Parnell had laughed, and the jury exchanged
glances, nodding to each other; and while the whole of Westminster Hall murmured, More proffered again, speaking against the
noise, his treasonable method of counting. My conscience holds
with the majority, which makes me know it does not speak false.
‘Against Henry’s kingdom, I have all the kingdoms of Christendom. Against each one of your bishops, I have a hundred saints.
Against your one parliament, I have all the general councils of
the church, stretching back for a thousand years.’
Norfolk said, take him out. It is finished.
Now it is Tuesday, it is eight o’clock. The rain drums against
the window. He breaks the seal of a letter from the Duke of Richmond. The boy complains that in Yorkshire where he is seated,
he has no deer park, so can show his friends no sport. Oh, you
poor tiny duke, he thinks, how can I relieve your pain?
Gregory’s dowager with the black teeth, the one he is going to
marry; she has a deer park, so perhaps the princeling should
divorce Norfolk’s daughter and marry her instead? He flips aside
Richmond’s letter, tempted to file it on the floor; he passes on.
The Emperor has left Sardinia with his fleet, sailing to Sicily. A
priest at St Mary Woolchurch says Cromwell is a sectary and he
is not frightened of him: fool. Harry Lord Morley sends him a
greyhound. There is news of refugees pouring out of the
Münster area, some of them heading for England.
Audley had said, ‘Prisoner, the court will ask the king to make
grace upon you, as to the manner of your death.’ Audley had
leaned across: Master Secretary, did you promise him anything?
On my life, no: but surely the king will be good to him? Norfolk
says, Cromwell, will you move him in that regard? He will take it from you; but if he will not, I myself will come and plead with
him. What a marvel: Norfolk, asking for mercy? He had glanced
up, to see More taken out, but he had vanished already, the tall
halberdiers closing rank behind him: the boat for the Tower is
waiting at the steps. It must feel like going home: the familiar
room with the narrow window, the table empty of papers, the
pricket candle, the drawn blind.
The window rattles; it startles him, and he thinks, I shall bolt
the shutter. He is rising to do it when Rafe comes in with a book
in his hand. ‘It is his prayer book, that More had with him at the
last.’
He examines it. Mercifully, no blood specks. He holds it up by
the spine and lets the leaves fan out. ‘I already did that,’ Rafe
says.
More has written his name in it. There are underlinings in the
text: Remember not the sins of my youth. ‘What a pity he remembered Richard Riche’s.’
‘Shall I have it sent to Dame Alice?’
‘No. She might think she is one of the sins.’ The woman has
put up with enough. In his last letter, he didn’t even say goodbye
to her. He shuts the book. ‘Send it to Meg. He probably meant it
for her anyway.’
The whole house is rocking about him; wind in the eaves,
wind in the chimneys, a piercing draught under every door. It’s
cold enough for a fire, Rafe says, shall I see to it? He shakes his
head. ‘Tell Richard, tomorrow morning, go to London Bridge
and see the bridge-master. Mistress Roper will come to him and
beg her father’s head to bury it. The man should take what Meg
offers and see she is not impeded. And keep his mouth shut.’
Once in Italy, when he was young, he had joined a burial
party. It isn’t something you volunteer for; you’re just told. They
had bound cloth across their mouths, and shovelled their
comrades into unhallowed ground; walked away with the smell
of putrefaction on their boots. Which is worse, he thinks, to have your daughters dead before
you, or to leave them to tidy away your remains?
‘There’s something …’ He frowns down at his papers. ‘What
have I forgotten, Rafe?’
‘Your supper?’
‘Later.’
‘Lord Lisle?’
‘I’ve dealt with Lord Lisle.’ Dealt with the river Humber.
With the slanderous priest from Mary Woolchurch; well, not
dealt with him, but put him in the pending pile. He laughs. ‘You
know what I need? I need the memory machine.’
Guido has quit Paris, they say. He has scuttled back to Italy
and left the device half built. They say that before his flight for
some weeks he had neither spoken nor eaten. His well-wishers
say he has gone mad, awed by the capacities of his own creature:
fallen into the abyss of the divine. His ill-wishers maintain that
demons crawled out of the crannies and crevices of the device,
and panicked him so that he ran off by night in his shirt with not
even a crust and a lump of cheese for the journey, leaving all his
books behind him and his magus’s robes.
It is not impossible that Guido has left writings behind in
France. For a fee they might be obtained. It is not impossible to
have him followed to Italy; but would there be any point? It is
likely, he thinks, that we shall never know what his invention
really was. A printing press that can write its own books? A
mind that thinks about itself? If I don’t have it, at least the King
of France doesn’t either.
He reaches for his pen. He yawns and puts it down and picks
it up again. I shall be found dead at my desk, he thinks, like the
poet Petrarch. The poet wrote many unsent letters: he wrote to
Cicero, who died twelve hundred years before he was born. He
wrote to Homer, who possibly never even existed; but I, I have
enough to do with Lord Lisle, and the fish traps, and the
Emperor’s galleons tossing on the Middle Sea. Between one dip of the pen, Petrarch writes, ‘between one dip of the pen and the
next, the time passes: and I hurry, I drive myself, and I speed
towards death. We are always dying – I while I write, you while
you read, and others while they listen or block their ears; they
are all dying.’
He picks up the next batch of letters. A man called Batcock
wants a licence to import 100 tuns of woad. Harry Percy is sick
again. The authorities in Yorkshire have rounded up their rioters,
and divided them into those to be charged with affray and
manslaughter, and those to be indicted for murder and rape.
Rape? Since when do food riots involve rape? But I forget, this is
Yorkshire.
‘Rafe, bring me the king’s itinerary. I’ll check that and then I’m
finished here. I think we might have some music before we go to
bed.’
The court is riding west this summer, as far as Bristol. The
king is ready to leave, despite the rain. They will depart from
Windsor, then to Reading, Missenden, Abingdon, moving across
Oxfordshire, their spirits lifting, we hope, with the distance from
London; he says to Rafe, if the country air goes to work, the
queen will return with a big belly. Rafe says, I wonder the king
can stand the hope each time. It would wear out a lesser man.
‘If we ourselves leave London on the eighteenth, we can aim to
catch up with them at Sudely. Will that work?’
‘Better leave a day earlier. Consider the state of the roads.’
‘There won’t be any short cuts, will there?’ He will use no
fords but bridges, and against his inclination he will stick to the
main roads; better maps would help. Even in the cardinal’s day
he was asking himself, might this be a project we could undertake? There are maps, of a kind; castles stud their fields, their
battlements prettily inked, their chases and parks marked by
lines of bushy trees, with drawings of harts and bristling boar. It
is no wonder Gregory mistook Northumbria for the Indies, for
these maps are deficient in all practical respects; they do not, for example, tell you which way is north. It would be useful to know
where the bridges are, and to have a note of the distance between
them. It would be useful to know how far you are from the sea.
But the trouble is, maps are always last year’s. England is always
remaking herself, her cliffs eroding, her sandbanks drifting,
springs bubbling up in dead ground. They regroup themselves
while we sleep, the landscapes through which we move, and even
the histories that trail us; the faces of the dead fade into other
faces, as a spine of hills into the mist.
When he was a small child, six years old or about that, his
father’s apprentice had been making nails from the scrap pile: just
common old flat-heads, he’d said, for fastening coffin lids. The
nail rods glowed in the fire, a lively orange. ‘What for do we nail
down the dead?’
The boy barely paused, tapping out each head with two neat
strokes. ‘It’s so the horrible old buggers don’t spring out and
chase us.’
He knows different now. It’s the living that turn and chase the
dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds,
and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit
their writings, we rewrite their lives. Thomas More had spread
the rumour that Little Bilney, chained to the stake, had recanted
as the fire was set. It wasn’t enough for him to take Bilney’s life
away; he had to take his death too.
Today, More was escorted to the scaffold by Humphrey
Monmouth, serving his turn as Sheriff of London. Monmouth is
too good a man to rejoice in the reversal of fortune. But perhaps
we can rejoice for him?
More is at the block, he can see him now. He is wrapped in a
rough grey cape that he remembers as belonging to his servant
John Wood. He is speaking to the headsman, apparently making
some quip to him, wiping the drizzle from his face and beard. He
is shedding the cape, the hem of which is sodden with rainwater.
He kneels at the block, his lips moving in his final prayer. Like all the other witnesses, he swirls his own cloak about him
and kneels. At the sickening sound of the axe on flesh he darts
one glance upwards. The corpse seems to have leapt back from
the stroke and folded itself like a stack of old clothes – inside
which, he knows, its pulses are still beating. He makes the sign of
the cross. The past moves heavily inside him, a shifting of
ground.
‘So, the king,’ he says. ‘From Gloucester, he strikes out to
Thornbury. Then Nicholas Poynz’s house at Iron Acton: does
Poynz know what he’s letting himself in for? From there to
Bromham …’
Just this last year a scholar, a foreigner, has written a chronicle
of Britain, which omits King Arthur on the ground that he never
existed. A good ground, if he can sustain it; but Gregory says, no,
he is wrong. Because if he is right, what will happen to Avalon?
What will happen to the sword in the stone?
He looks up. ‘Rafe, are you happy?’
‘With Helen?’ Rafe blushes. ‘Yes, sir. No man was ever
happier.’
‘I knew your father would come round, once he had seen her.’
‘It is only thanks to you, sir.’
From Bromham – we are now in early September – towards
Winchester. Then Bishop’s Waltham, Alton, Alton to Farnham.
He plots it out, across country. The object is to get the king back
to Windsor for early October. He has his sketch map across the
page, England in a drizzle of ink; his calendar, quickly jotted,
running down it. ‘I seem to have four, five days in hand. Ah well.
Who says I never get a holiday?’
Before ‘Bromham’, he makes a dot in the margin, and draws a
long arrow across the page. ‘Now here, before we go to Winchester, we have time to spare, and what I think is, Rafe, we shall visit
the Seymours.’
He writes it down.
Early September. Five days. Wolf Hall .

AUTHOR’S NOTE

In parts of medieval Europe, the official new year began on 25
March, Lady Day, which was believed to be the date when an
angel announced to Mary that she was carrying the child Jesus.
As early as 1522, Venice adopted 1 January as the start of the new
year, and other European countries followed at intervals, though
England did not catch up till 1752. In this book, as in most histories, the years are dated from 1 January, which was celebrated as
one of the twelve days of Christmas and was the day on which
gifts were exchanged.
The gentleman usher George Cavendish, after the death of
Wolsey, retired to the country, and in 1554, when Mary came to
the throne, began a book, ‘Thomas Wolsey, late Cardinal, his
Life and Death.’ It has been published in many editions, and can
be found online in an edition with original spelling. It is not
always accurate, but it is a very touching, immediate and readable
account of Wolsey’s career and Thomas Cromwell’s part in it. Its
influence on Shakespeare is clear. Cavendish took four years to
complete his book, and died just as Elizabeth came to the throne.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I should like to thank Delyth Neil for the Welsh, Leslie Wilson
for the German, and a Norfolk lady for the Flemish. Guada
Abale for lending me a song. Judith Flanders for helping me
when I couldn’t get to the British Library. Dr Christopher Haigh
for inviting me to a splendid dinner in Wolsey’s hall at Christ
Church. Jan Rogers for sharing a pilgrimage to Canterbury and a
drink at the Cranmer Arms at Aslockton. Gerald McEwen for
driving me around and putting up with my preoccupations. My
agent Bill Hamilton and my publishers for their support and
encouragement. Above all, Dr Mary Robertson; her business as a
scholar has been with the facts of Cromwell’s life, but she has
encouraged me and lent me her expertise through the production
of this fiction, put up with my fumbling speculations and been
kind enough to recognise the portrait I have produced. This
book is dedicated to her, with my thanks and love.