JANUARY–JUNE 1540
The king’s new castle at Deal is a way station for Anna to wash her hands, take a fortifying glass of wine, and then pass on to Dover. She is escorted by Charles Brandon and by Richard Sampson, the Bishop of Chichester, that tight-lipped prelate so experienced in the making and breaking of the king’s unions.
Brandon has his young wife with him. She is of a quick, warm nature; what could be better for an uncertain bride, than to be welcomed by a smiling young duchess who will divine what she needs? You can’t expect Charles to know, Bishop Sampson still less. But Charles cuts an impressive martial figure. And Sampson will take himself off to a corner and busy himself with paperwork.
In Dover, God willing, Anna’s baggage will catch up with her. Next day she will set out—with her chaplains and her secretaries and her musicians and maids—to Canterbury, where she will meet the archbishop. She will want ready money, and so he, Cromwell, has arranged for a gold chalice to be presented, fifty sovereigns inside. As she passes through to Rochester, Norfolk will escort her with a large party of gentlemen. There are no plans for her to meet the Bishop of Winchester. That treat can be saved up. After all, Lord Cromwell’s boys say, we don’t want her to turn tail and start wading out to sea again.
The weather en route is foul. But the bride was not seasick, and thinks nothing of travelling with the rain and hail in her face. The masters of ceremony are relieved, because they have planned a huge reception at Blackheath outside Greenwich palace, and if she does not keep on schedule they will incur heavy costs. He, Lord Cromwell, expects the countryside to turn out. He has had the streets at Greenwich cleaned and gravelled, and barriers erected so the crowds don’t push each other into the Thames.
All winter at Austin Friars he has been laying in muscatel and malmsey with a view to celebration. In the bakehouse they are making Striezel to take to Anna and her ladies, and the smell of cloves and cinnamon and orange peel has crept though the house. When Lizzie was alive, Twelfth Night was their occasion to feast their neighbours. They would enact Three Kings, their costumes patched with every gilded off-cut, scraps too small for the greediest tailor. Every hand that could hold a needle would go to work, and Lizzie would make them cheer while they sewed. One year they made Anne Cromwell into a cat with a coney-skin tail, and Gregory into a fish with shining silver scales; the low winter light slid over him, and he glimmered in the dusk.
He wonders how his daughter Jenneke is faring, and when he will see her again. He does not say to himself ‘if’, because he is always inclined to think the world will turn our way. It seems strange to him that Lizzie never saw her. She would have accepted the stranger; she knew when they married he was a man with a past.
It is a long time now since the women of the house put his little daughters in their graveclothes. He has got used to a certain feeling of tightness that settles behind the breastbone, that comes around by the calendar: Easter, St John’s Day, Lammas, Michaelmas, All Souls and All Saints.
The year 1539 is drawing to its close, and when he enters the king’s presence at Greenwich with a file of business in his hand, he is prepared to find the king playing the harp, or listing the New Year presents he hopes to receive, or merely making paper darts, but in any event unprepared for work. But there is a stir in the privy chamber, and young Culpeper comes out: ‘You will never guess, sir! He is going himself to Rochester, to meet the queen.’
He pushes his files at Culpeper. ‘Wriothesley, come in with me.’
Henry is bending down, peering into a trunk the Wardrobe has sent. He stands up, cheerful: ‘My lord, I have decided to make speed and meet the bride in my own person.’
‘Why, sir? It will only be a day or two before she arrives.’
Henry says, ‘I want to nourish love.’
‘Majesty,’ Mr Wriothesley says, ‘with all respect, was this not aired in council? It was your councillors’ earnest prayer that your Majesty spare himself the journey, and greet the queen at Blackheath. And you were pleased to accede.’
‘Can I not change my mind, Wriothesley? At Blackheath there will be music and ordnance and processions and crowds and we shall not speak a dozen private words before we must ride back here to the palace, and then it will be hours before we have a chance to be alone. And I want to surprise her, and gladden her heart, and bid her a proper welcome.’
‘Sir, if you will be advised by me…’ he says.
‘But I will not. Admit it, Cromwell, you are no adept in courtship.’
True. He’s only been married once. ‘She is hardly off the ship, sir. Think how shamed she will be, if she cannot appear at her best.’
Mr Wriothesley adds, ‘And she may, of course, be overwhelmed by your Majesty’s presence.’
‘But that is why I must go! I will spare her anxiety. She will be working herself up towards great ceremonies.’ Henry smiles. ‘I shall go in disguise.’
He closes his eyes.
‘It is what a king does,’ Henry tells him. ‘You cannot know, Cromwell, you are not a courtier born. When my sister Margaret went into Scotland, King James and his hunting party surprised her at the castle of Dalkeith, he in a jacket of crimson velvet, his lyre slung over his shoulder.’
One has heard. The dashing youth with burning eyes, swift to bend the knee; the bride in the pretty confusion of thirteen summers, her cheek blushing, her body trembling.
Mr Wriothesley says, ‘May I ask, what disguise does your Majesty mean to adopt?’
They exchange a glance. When Katherine was queen she was repeatedly ambushed by Robin Hood, or Arcadian shepherds. When they threw off their disguise, lo and behold! It was the king and Charles Brandon; it was Charles Brandon and the king.
‘I have sables for her,’ Henry says. ‘Perhaps I should arrive as a Russian nobleman, in great fur boots?’
Mr Wriothesley says, ‘Unless we send word ahead, I am afraid that your Majesty might alarm his own guard. It could lead to—’
‘A shepherd, then. Or one of the Magi. We can quickly get disguisings for the other two kings. Send to Charles—’
‘Or perhaps, sir,’ he says, ‘just go as a gentleman?’
‘A gentleman of England,’ Henry is thoughtful. ‘A gentleman with no name. Yes,’ he looks downcast, ‘very well, I shall be ruled by Lord Cromwell, as all the foreigners claim I am. I shall astonish her anyway.’ He pauses and says kindly, ‘My lord, I know it is not what we agreed. But a bridegroom must have his caprices, and disguising always gives pleasure. The dowager Katherine,’ he says to Wriothesley, ‘she would pretend not to know me. Of course, she did but play with me. Everybody knows the king.’
Thomas Culpeper follows them out. ‘Your papers, gentlemen?’
Wriothesley snatches them. He, Lord Cromwell, walks away. ‘Christ,’ he says.
Culpeper says, ‘You did what you could.’
He thinks, I spoke to him as a subject to a prince. What if I had taken courage and said: Henry, I am advising you, man to man, not to do it?
Culpeper says, ‘Why are you apprehensive? Everybody praises her, don’t they? Are you afraid he will find her not as reported?’
‘Cease to hang on my sleeve, Culpeper.’
Culpeper smiles. ‘I know she will find him not as reported. We appreciate you bend the facts, Lord Cromwell, to please foreigners—but you have not described him as a god, I hope? Is she expecting Apollo?’
‘She is expecting a proper court reception. It is what her people have prepared her for.’ He turns to Wriothesley. ‘I need someone to make speed to Rochester and warn her. The king will come on the river with a small train and Anna should be ready for him. No heralds, no ceremony—he will enter her chamber and she should be astonished.’
‘So you are going to spoil his surprise,’ Culpeper says. ‘She must not know him, then she must? She will be lucky to time it right.’
‘I wonder,’ he says to Wriothesley, ‘should I have insisted I go with him?’
Call-Me says, ‘It could be worse, sir. At least he’s not going to wear his Turkish costume.’
The king intends to join the queen in Rochester on New Year’s Day, and stay overnight; even if he sends a messenger back to say how he likes her, it will be hours before word arrives at Greenwich.
So, he thinks, the news can come to Austin Friars almost as fast. He journeys home, to start 1540 under his own roof.
He goes early to his desk. It is a day found, he tells himself. But he pushes away a bundle of letters from Carlisle, picks up a book. It is Rolewinck’s history, where all the dates before Christ are printed upside down. Jane Rochford’s father sent it, and he can never just leave you to read; he writes Mirabilia! beside events he particularly enjoys.
He turns the pages to look at the pictures: Antioch, Jerusalem, Temple of Solomon and Tower of Babel. Rolewinck starts his story in the year 6615 (upside down). He is reading about the coronation of Pope Innocent—which occurred, more or less, the year that he himself was born—when his spaniel Bella runs yapping to the door. From below he can hear, ‘Happy New Year, Mr Gregory!’
Bella runs in excited circles. He calls down: ‘Gregory? Why are you here?’
Gregory bangs in. He does not pause for a greeting. ‘Why did you let this happen? Why did you not stop him?’
‘Stop him?’ he says. ‘How? He said it was to nourish love.’
‘You should have prevented it, sir. You are his councillor.’
‘Gregory, drink off a cup of this, and get warm. I thought you were staying with the queen?’
‘I came to warn you. Henry passed the night, but now he is on his way back.’
One of Thurston’s boys comes in with a platter of pastries, and whisks off the cloth. ‘Venison and currant jelly. Pike and horseradish. Plum and raisin.’
‘You see,’ he says, ‘this is why I’ve come home. At court your food has to walk half a mile, you get it cold.’
Another boy brings a bowl of hot water and a napkin, and Gregory is forced to silence till they are alone. Bella capers on her hind legs as if to divert them. He thinks of the scenes he used to stage with George Cavendish, the cardinal’s man. He would say, ‘Show me how it was, George—who sat where, who spoke first.’ And Cavendish would jump up and play the king.
He can lay out this stage in his mind, where bride and groom meet: the old hall at Rochester, the great fireplace with its carved emblems: a fern, a heart, a Welsh dragon holding an orb. He can follow the king with his train of merry men; they hold their masks loosely, playfully, because they expect to be recognised in seconds. And indeed, as they pass, the new queen’s servants kneel.
‘Anna was warned?’ he asks. ‘She was ready?’
‘She was warned, but she was not ready. The king billowed in, but she was looking out of the window—they were baiting a bull in the courtyard. She cast a glance over her shoulder, then she turned away to the sport.’
He can see what Gregory saw: the bulky shape of the king blacking out the light. And the foggy outline of the queen, with the window behind her: the blank oval of her face, a swift glance from her dark eyes, and then the back of her head.
‘I suppose she did not believe a prince would come in secret. Maybe Duke Wilhelm goes everywhere with trumpeters and drums.’
Even to nourish love, he thinks. There is talk that the Emperor has offered Anna’s brother the Duchess Christina as his bride, if he will hand back Guelders without a fight. He thinks, if I were the Duke of Cleves, I would not give my seacoast for her dimples.
‘The king bowed low.’ Gregory takes a gulp of his wine. ‘And addressed her, but she did not turn. I think she took him for—I do not know what—some Jolly Jankin dressed up for the festival. And so he stood, his hat in his hand—then her people swarmed in, and someone called out, “Madam,” and a phrase to alert her…’ Gregory falters. ‘And then she turned. And she knew who he was. And as Christ is my Saviour, Father, the look in her eye! I will never forget it.’ Gregory sits down, as if at the end of his strength. ‘Nor will the king.’
He picks Bella up, and begins to feed her a pastry, crumb by crumb. ‘Why should she be astonished? I made no false representation.’
‘You did not tell her he was old.’
‘Am I old? Is that what you would first think of, if you described Cromwell? Oh, he is old?’
‘No,’ Gregory says unwillingly.
‘She knew his date of birth. She knew he was stout. Surely, enough gentlemen from her court have passed to and fro? And Hans—Hans could have described him. Who better?’
‘But Hans will never get himself in trouble.’
That much is true. ‘What did the king do?’
‘He fell back. Any man would have been stricken. She flinched from him. He could not miss it.’
‘And?’
‘Then she recovered herself. She dissimulated marvellous well. And so did he. She said in English, “My lord and my king, welcome.”’
It was for him to say, welcome. ‘Go on.’
‘She made a smooth curtsey, very low, as if nothing had occurred. And the king smiled and uplifted her. He said, “Welcome, sweetheart.”’ What it is to be royal, he thinks. Gregory adds, ‘His hand was trembling.’
In his imagined hall at Rochester, the light is failing. Below the queen’s window, soundless, the bull-baiters roar. The dogs hang from the bull’s flesh. Slow gouts of blood patter onto the paving. ‘And the king’s gentlemen? What did they do?’
What he means is, did they see it all?
‘Anthony Browne was behind him, carrying the sables for her. But Henry waved him back. He was looking in the lady’s face and all the time talking.’
‘Gregory,’ he says, ‘did Hans paint her truly?’
‘He would not dare do other, would he?’
‘And she is beautiful?’
‘Not sideways. She has a long nose. But you know he had no time to draw her from all angles. She is pleasant-looking. She is a little marked with smallpox, but I only saw that when the sun chanced to come out. The king cannot have seen it, he had turned his back.’
She is lovely in the shadows, then. And when facing front. He could almost laugh. ‘Is he disappointed?’
‘If he is, he did not show it. He led her by the hand. They went aside and sat down with the interpreters. He asked how she liked England and she said, very well. He asked, how was she entertained in Calais, and she said, very well. He congratulated her on making the voyage so bravely, and asked had she been on the sea before? When they translated this, she looked startled.’
He pictures the king, sweating with the effort. His eyes roaming around, looking for a diversion.
‘The king called for music. A consort came in and they played “O fair white hand that heals me”. She attended to it very sweetly. She said, through the interpreter, she would like to learn to play some instrument. The king said, easier when young. She said, I am not so old, and my fingers are kept supple by plying my needle. The king asked, could she sing, and she said, in praise of Mary and the saints. He said, would she sing, and she said, not before all these lords, but I will sing when we are alone. And she blushed.’
‘That is a very proper modesty.’ Think of Anne Boleyn; she would have sung in the street, if she thought it might get her some attention.
‘We say we like modesty,’ Gregory picks up one of the pastries, and Bella, at his feet, touches him with her paw. ‘But really we prefer it when maids show their favour plain. We like to know we are well-accepted, before we begin to court them. I should never have dared speak to Bess, if you and Edward Seymour had not helped me. If a woman might despise us, we would rather avoid her.’
And when we find the courage to present ourselves, he thinks, we do not want to see shock on her face. ‘So you think damage is done?’
‘I don’t see how she will undo that first moment, even if she were the Queen of Sheba.’ Gregory takes a bite of his pastry; Bella leans against his shin and adores him. ‘They went into supper. She was very attentive, turning her eyes to everything he said. It is a poor beginning, but considering one cannot talk to her, I like her very much, and so do we all. Fitzwilliam himself says, she is as good a woman as he will find if he scours Europe.’
‘I think he has scoured it,’ he says. ‘I have, at least. Well … he will understand, when he thinks about it, that she was startled. And you say yourself, he was happy enough afterwards.’ He considers. His eye falls on Lord Morley’s history. ‘We must roll back time. It will be as if the king blinked, and then lived that first moment again.’
Gregory says, ‘But is that how time works?’ As the pastries disappear, the plate’s pattern emerges. Fatto in Venezia, it depicts the Fall of Troy: the wooden horse, the screaming women, the rolling heads, and the towers in bursts of flame.
Wonderful, how they get it all in.
He arrives at Greenwich not long after the king. ‘My lord, his Majesty is in his library.’
Henry sits amid boxes of books. ‘These are from Tewkesbury Abbey.’ He rises heavily from his chair. ‘Cromwell, we have not had the papers from Cleves about the Lorraine marriage, the pre-contract. It was stated emphatically the lady would bring them with her, but it appears she did not. Even the least suspicious man would ask himself why they have still not shown them, after all these months.’
He begins to speak, but the king holds up his hand. ‘I cannot proceed. I cannot marry her till I am sure she is clear of all past promises.’
The king closes one fist in the other. ‘I find the lady nothing so well as she is spoken of. Fitzwilliam wrote from Calais and praised her outright. Lisle too. What made them do so?’
‘I have not seen her, sir.’
‘No, you have not seen her,’ the king says. ‘You have been at the mercy of reports, as have I, so you cannot be blamed. But when I encountered her yesterday, I tell you, I had much ado to master myself. A great outlandish bonnet with wings sticking out either side of her head—and with her height, and stiff as she is—I thought to myself, she looks like the Cornhill Maypole. I believe she had painted her mouth, which if true is a filthy thing.’
‘Her attire can be changed, sir.’
‘Her complexion is sallow. When I think of Jane, so white and clear, a pearl.’
Golden lights waver on the ceiling. They play on the crimson plaster roses, the green leaves between, the blood-washed thorns. ‘It is the journey,’ he says. ‘All those tedious miles with a baggage train, then the delays, and the voyage.’ He thinks of the hail in her face on the Dover road. ‘As for the papers, I cannot guess why the ambassadors have not brought them. But we are assured the lady is completely free. We know there was no pre-contract. We know the parties were not of age. You said yourself, sir, it is no great matter.’
‘It is a great matter, if I think I am married, and find I am not.’
‘Tomorrow,’ he promises, ‘I will talk with the queen’s people.’
‘Tomorrow I meet her at Blackheath,’ the king says. ‘We start at eight o’clock.’
It is forty years since a bride came here from a far country: the Infanta Catalina, who brought Moorish slaves in her entourage when she left Spain to marry Arthur. That wedding was public and splendid. This time the marriage celebrations must give way to the church’s rites for Epiphany. All hangs, therefore, on the public welcome he has devised for Anna.
At Greenwich he lies in bed, listening to the wind.
What means this when I lie alone?
I toss, I turn, I sigh, I groan.
My bed to me seems hard as stone
What means this?
He wonders, where does Wyatt lie tonight? With whom? I dare swear he is not alone.
I sigh, I plain continually.
The clothes that on my bed do lie
Always methinks they lie awry
What means this?
Only a raging storm will stop tomorrow’s reception. The king may decide to delay the marriage, but he cannot leave his bride out on the heath. He cannot undo the anticipation of the countryside, when it has been stirred up by heralds, and the welcome proclaimed through London.
Three times he rises and opens the shutter. There is nothing to see but a muffled, starless black. But the drumbeat of rain falters, dawn stripes the sky in shades of ochre, and the sun feels its way out of banks of cloud. By nine o’clock, when he is at Blackheath on horseback, there is a white haze over the fields: in that haze, the freefolk of England. A steady roar comes from the river, where hundreds have turned out in any craft they can command, their home-made flags and banners hanging limp in the still morning. They are bashing drums and tootling fifes, bawling out songs and sporting on their persons knitted roses. Some are toddling along the banks inside pasteboard castles, their heads sticking out from the crenellations, and others have fabricated a canvas swan of monstrous size, which turns its neck from side to side and waddles along, a dozen pair of feet in workmen’s boots emerging beneath its feathers. Harness bells jingle. Men and horses breathe vapour into the air. He finds he is sweating inside his velvet. He is irritating even himself, trotting up and down, on and off his horse, his eyes everywhere, mouthing pointless exhortations: stand here, move along, attend, follow, kneel!
Charles Brandon tips his hat to him. ‘Weather a credit to you, Lord Cromwell!’ He laughs, and spurs off to join the other dukes.
The chaplains, the councillors, the great officers of the royal household, file in their ranks: the gentlemen of the privy chamber, and the bishops in black satin; the peers, the Lord Mayor, the heralds, the Duke of Bavaria wearing the collar of the Golden Fleece; the king himself, in a wide expanse of light, mounted on a great courser, in purple and cloth of gold, his garments slashed and puffed, sashed and swagged, so studded and slung with belts of gemstones that he seems to be wearing a suit of armour forged and welded for Zeus.
The queen waits for the royal party in a silken pavilion. He prays the wind will not get up and toss it in the river. Anna is dressed in the best fashion of her country, her caul topped by a bonnet stiff with pearls, her gown cut full and round, without a train. She glitters as they enthrone her on her mount, side-saddle and facing left in the English fashion. No one knew what to expect from a German: Spanish ladies ride to the right; he hears the Lord Chancellor say, thank God for that, we do not want him to think of Spaniards. He says stiffly, ‘Nothing has been left to chance, my lord. I have spoken with her Master of Horse.’
By afternoon—drums, artillery, several changes of clothes—the glow has gone from the sky and the air is dank and greenish. Gardiner rides up: ‘How did you hold the rain off?’
‘I sold my soul,’ he says calmly.
‘I hear there was an upset at Rochester.’
‘You know more than I do.’
‘So I do. High time you admitted it.’ Gardiner smirks and rides away.
The French ambassador reins in beside him: ‘Cremuel, I have simply never seen so many fat gold chains assembled in one place. I commend you, it is no small matter to keep five thousand people on time and in their ranks. Though frankly,’ he sniffs, ‘the whole of it does not equal even one of the ceremonial entries my king makes in the course of a year. And they would be, I believe, twenty or so in number.’
‘Truly?’ he says. ‘Twenty occasions like this? No wonder he has no time to govern.’
Marillac’s horse shifts under him, sidestepping. ‘What do you think of the lady? She is not as young as one expected.’
‘I do not like to contradict you, but she is exactly the age one expected.’
‘She is very tall.’
‘So is the king.’
‘True. On that account he wanted to marry Madame de Longueville, did he not? A pity he did not work harder at it. I hear she will give King James a child this spring.’
He says, ‘The king has good expectation of children with this lady.’
‘Of course. If she can rouse him to action. Be honest, she is no great beauty.’
He admits, ‘I have hardly seen her as yet.’ It is as if they are conspiring to keep him away from her. He can see only a stiff, bright-coloured figure, like a painted queen on an inn sign. She has ridden the last half-mile to meet the king, both of them on horses so splendidly trapped that you can hardly see their hooves as they tread the ground. Meg Douglas follows in first place, and after her Mary Fitzroy. The ladies of the court travel behind in a line of chariots. Gregory’s wife wears the revenue of two manors on her back, but it is his pleasure; it is a long time since he had a woman to dress, and he says to Marillac, ‘Look, my son’s wife, is she not handsome?’
‘A credit to you,’ Marillac says, and indicates with his whip: is that the Scottish princess? And is that Norfolk’s daughter, my lady Richmond? ‘No new husband for her yet?’
There was talk last year of marrying the girl to Tom Seymour, but nothing came of it, no doubt because her brother knocked it back; Wolf Hall is a hovel, as far as Surrey is concerned, and the Seymours are peasants who live by trapping rabbits.
He wonders, why does Marillac care about Norfolk’s daughter? Has he got a French husband in mind for her? The French give Norfolk a yearly pension but perhaps they are looking for closer ties?
Bess glances in his direction; he raises a hand, but in a stealthy way, in case he appears to be giving a signal for some démarche. In the next chariot come the maids of honour: Lady Lisle’s daughter Anne Bassett, and Mary Norris looking chilled, and Norfolk’s plump little niece Katherine, gawping about her as if she were in church.
The ground has been cleared to make a path for the king and queen right to the palace gates. They ride together into the inner court. There they dismount and the king, taking her arm, leads his bride into the palace, sweeping his great plumed hat about him to show her, all this is yours, madam, all that you see. The music from the river follows them: fading only as he, Lord Cromwell, follows them indoors, where the torches are already lit in welcome.
It is now that he sees her close for the first time. He has braced himself, his face fitted with a carefully neutral expression. But there is nothing to offend. Quite the opposite; he feels her knows her. It is true her complexion is dull, but it is as Gregory says, she is a pleasant-looking woman, who might be married to one of your friends; the city wife of a city merchant. You can imagine her rocking a cradle with one foot, while talking about the price of pork.
Anna looks him over. ‘Oh, you are Lord Cromwell. Thank you for the fifty sovereigns.’ One of her entourage speaks in her ear. ‘Thank you for everything,’ she says.
Sunday morning: he breaks it to the delegation from Cleves that the bridegroom wants a delay. They are taken aback. ‘We thought we had been through all this, Lord Cromwell. We have furnished copies of everything relevant.’
He maintains a civil stiffness; he does not want them to see he is as exasperated as they are. ‘The king is enquiring for the originals.’
We have explained again and again, they say, that we do not know what those would be: since the promises of a marriage, such as they were, were rolled up within a larger treaty, which was several times amended, and so …
‘I advise you to produce them,’ he says. He sits down, and, though it is early, indicates a jug of wine should come in. ‘Gentlemen, this should not be beyond our wit to solve.’
Not all the Cleves gentlemen are fluent in French. One nudges another: what did he say? ‘May I refer you to precedent? When Queen Katherine—I mean, the dowager Katherine, the late Princess of Wales—’
Oh yes, they say, Henry’s first wife …
‘—when her mother Isabella married her father Ferdinand, they needed a dispensation from the Pope, but it was delayed—’
Ah, we understand, they say. Rome angling for more money, was it not?
‘But everything else was ready, and so Ferdinand’s people stepped aside and created what was required … papal seals and all.’
So what are you advising? they say.
‘I would not presume to advise. But do what you must, to satisfy the king. Search your baggage. Look between the pages of your Bibles.’
We need time to confer, they say.
‘Be quick,’ William Fitzwilliam says, coming in.
Oh, we will, they say. We cannot brook delay. The rumours would be running everywhere, imagine what the French would say, imagine the lies the Emperor’s people would spread. They would be saying he does not like her. Or that she finds him too old and stout and is protesting she will not do it.
‘You gentlemen must come to the council after dinner,’ he says, ‘and spell out to them the danger of such rumours. The king will join us when he and the queen come from Mass.’
He walks to the council chamber with Fitz. Fitz tugs his arm. ‘Is there no help for it? Henry is seething inside, I know him.’
True, he thinks, you know him. He threw you out of the council, stripped of your chain of office: till he changed his mind, or I changed it for him.
‘The papers are an excuse,’ Fitzwilliam says. ‘He dislikes her or he is frightened of her, I know not what it is. But mark this, Cromwell—I will not be stuck with the blame, just because it was I who met her in Calais.’
‘No one seeks to blame you. It is his own fault, if fault there is. For rushing about the countryside like a love-lorn youth.’
The councillors are already assembled. Cranmer is seated, as if his strength has given out; he makes to rise, then sinks down again. The Bishop of Durham inclines his head: ‘My lord Privy Seal.’ His tone suggests he is consecrating something; or handling fragile remains, ready to disintegrate.
He nods. ‘Your Grace.’ Tunstall knows the Lord Privy Seal has been examining his affairs for months: enquiring what he does up in Durham, and what he truly believes. So these days he takes his seat charily, like a man who thinks he might have it kicked from under him.
Thomas Howard bustles in. He looks bright-eyed, as if there were something to celebrate. ‘So, Cromwell. He wants to get out of it, I hear.’
He sits down, not waiting for the duke to sit. ‘The King of France and the Emperor are seeing in the new year together. They have not been so close in our lifetime. They are like planets, gentlemen, and their conjunction draws sea and land after them, and makes our fates. They have a fleet and funds to come against us. Our forts are still building. Ireland is against us. Scotland is against us. If we are not to be overrun this spring we need the princes of Germany on our side, either to send men to our aid or to engage our enemy till we can defeat him or force a truce. The king needs to make this marriage. England needs it.’
Charles Brandon looks mournful. ‘He agreed to it. He signed up. He cannot jib now.’
Norfolk says, ‘What happened at Rochester?’
‘I can’t say. I wasn’t there.’
Norfolk’s nose is twitching. ‘Something passed between them. Something mislikes him.’
Lord Audley says, ‘I agree with my lord Suffolk. The king has gone too far in the matter, he would need a very sound reason to withdraw now. He was convinced before that she was free to marry. And she seems a good enough woman to me.’
‘Perhaps you do not understand a prince’s requirements,’ Norfolk says.
‘No?’ Audley gives him a glance that would peel an egg. ‘If she does not come up to them, your Grace, I for one am not to blame.’
‘Cromwell thinks the king should blame himself,’ Fitz says. ‘For going with haste to Rochester.’
‘Blame himself?’ Tunstall says. ‘The king? When has that happened? You would think Cromwell had never met him.’
He says heavily, ‘I suppose I might institute a delay.’
‘What good would that do?’ Fitz asks.
He thinks, time might soften the memory of the moment they met. Henry might forget the look in her eye. But he does not know if Fitz witnessed it. So he says nothing.
Cranmer, good Christian that he is, refrains from saying, I told you so. Instead he says, ‘I accede to all your reasoning, my lords. And yet I am afraid the king’s conscience will be troubled, till he sees papers that will satisfy him. He has been deceived before. He should not enter into matrimony unless he gives his hearty consent, body and soul.’
Cranmer is too good to live. He forgets his own troubles and considers only Henry’s. He speaks across Norfolk to the archbishop: ‘The Cleves ambassadors have come to me just now with an offer. Two of them will stay here as sureties, till the papers are sent.’
Norfolk says, ‘Stable them till Easter? By the Mass, no!’
‘It seems unnecessary,’ Cranmer says. ‘We do not doubt the people in Cleves have made diligent search. I do not even doubt the lady is free. But it is the king’s doubts we have to reckon with.’
The door opens. They kneel. ‘Well,’ Henry says, ‘what have you devised for my relief?’
‘Nothing, sir,’ Cranmer says.
‘That is honest, at least. I begin to suspect there is less honesty in my councillors than a king should look for, and no good faith in those who offer themselves as allies and friends.’ Henry looks around, addresses Suffolk: ‘Charles, you were there in Windsor last September, were you not? When Duke Wilhelm’s people swore they would bring the documents full and entire?’
‘Aye, that they did,’ Brandon says. ‘Otherwise we would not have put our hands to the marriage treaty, would we? But,’ he says gently, ‘I think it is done now, you know.’
‘We can hold off a day,’ Fitz says. ‘Cromwell thinks so. Though I do not see the point.’
‘I am not well-handled,’ Henry says. ‘You may as well rise, gentlemen, I see no point in sitting here with you. Cromwell, walk with me.’
‘Well, you have seen her now,’ Henry says. ‘Is it not as I have told you?’
He says, ‘She is a very gentle lady, all agree. And it seems to me her manner is queenly.’
The king snorts. ‘It is for me to know what is queenly.’ He checks himself. ‘I was wrong about her mouth, perhaps.’
Sweet as a berry. Naturally red. He decides not to say so. It is a hopeful sign, if Henry will admit he has misjudged her in the smallest particular.
The other councillors have fallen behind, but the king’s guard keeps pace, obliged to close their ears. He says, cautiously, ‘You do not think she is like her picture, sir?’
‘I do not fault Hans. He drew her as well as he could considering all the’—the king dashes a hand against his jacket—‘the armour. She is so tall and stiff.’
‘Her height lends her distinction.’
‘Have you inspected her shoes?’ the king demands. ‘I think she must wear raised soles. Tell her women, there is no ordure on the floor of our houses. I don’t know what she is used to.’
It can all be altered, he says, clothes, shoes, and the king says, ‘So you keep telling me. But if I had known before what I know now, she would not have come a foot into the realm. It is a matter of…’ The king shakes his head. He pats his garments, as if he is feeling for his heart.
Monday, 5 January: two of Anne’s people, Olisleger and Hochsteden, come to his own chamber on the north side of the palace, where they take a solemn oath that Anne is free to marry, and commit to search out all relevant documents within three months. Their offer to remain in England, Henry has waved away, adding that Anne’s entourage is bloated and that they should feel free to take some of their countrymen with them when they go. Each principal gentleman in her train is to have a reward of a hundred pounds to speed him on his journey.
An agreement is drawn up and they sign for England: Cranmer, Audley, himself, Fitzwilliam, Bishop Tunstall.
Cranmer, his face harrowed, heads to the queen’s room, a great Bible following him in the hands of an interpreter. Inside the Bible, if you looked, you would see a picture of the king handing the scriptures to the people, who mill at the bottom of the page, where they cry ‘Vivat Rex!’ or ‘God Save the King!’—the lower orders preferring English.
The king glowers at his councillors, and retires into his inner rooms. Musicians come and set up their instruments and play.
In a short time Cranmer returns. Anna has taken an oath without hesitation, he says, to state that she is perfectly free from any marital tie. ‘She said she was glad to do it. She was by God’s grace most prompt and certain. She almost had the book out of my hands, so eager is she to please your Majesty. She wishes to be married without delay.’
He thinks, she is afraid of her family. What they will say, if she is sent back.
Henry groans. ‘Is there no help for it? Must I must put my neck into the yoke?’
He was right to think that when she came from the sea the bride would be rebaptised. She left the ship as Anna. Now she is landlocked as plain Anne, as if the king and all his treasury has not a syllable to spare.
Tuesday morning, raining, the councillors convene at seven. Usually he begins his working day by six, but he has put off all other petitioners, asking only for any dispatches from abroad to be treated as urgent.
Mr Wriothesley is perched on a table, watching him get into his wedding outfit. ‘What dispatches are you expecting, sir?’
Christophe drops his shirt over his head. ‘I bear in mind that the Emperor is a widower.’ His head emerges from the linen. ‘I would not put it past him to choose this week to announce his marriage to a Frenchwoman.’
If he did, he thinks, that would sharpen Henry’s appetite for his own bride.
‘God forbid!’ Call-Me says. ‘Wyatt is with the Emperor, he would have to prevent it.’
‘He would abduct the lady,’ Christophe offers. ‘Declaim a sonnet. Biff-boff with her in some roadside inn. Return to Emperor in used condition.’
In the king’s apartments, the councillors are talking in low voices, as if in the presence of someone dying. William Kingston: ‘My lord, this cannot be true? That the king has taken against the lady?’
He puts a finger to his lips. He has just endowed Anna with the first of many grants that will guarantee her income as queen. Her household is set up, a mirror of the king’s. The Earl of Rutland is her chamberlain. She has priests and pages, washerwomen and pastry cooks, cupbearers and ushers, footmen and grooms, auditors, receivers and surveyors. When the Cleves delegation arrives, he means to dwell on these details to reassure them—because yesterday’s ill-will, the tension in every look and gesture of the English, has escaped no one. His hope is that he can prevent them translating the tension into any sort of insult, which they will relay back to our allies.
Fitz comes in. He says abruptly, ‘I suppose we still need, what was it, alum?’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘And friends, we need friends as we never have before.’
Back in autumn he told the councillors, alum is very hard to extract. You must cut to the marrow of the mountains and prop your workings as you go. Now he enlarges on it to Fitz: you need heavy hammers and steel pikes and wedges. It is quickest to employ explosive devices. ‘The miners call them Pater Nosters—because when they go off, you jump out of your skin and shout, God Our Father Almighty!’
But Fitz is not listening. His head is cocked to sounds of dissatisfaction coming from the inner room. When the king himself comes out he is already dressed in his gown of cloth-of-gold strewn with silver flowers. ‘Where is my lord Essex? He is supposed to escort the bride. He is late, what will she think?’
‘May I offer?’ Fitz says, unwilling.
The king says, ‘It has to be an unmarried man, some custom they have in her native land—pointless, but she will want it to be observed.’ Henry’s eye falls on him. ‘You fetch her, my lord Privy Seal.’
‘I am not worthy,’ he says.
Henry says, ‘You are, my lord, if I say you are.’
The door is flung open. Henry Bouchier—old Essex—limps in. ‘What?’ he says, looking around.
‘LATE!’ the courtiers roar.
‘Ah, well, dark mornings,’ Essex says. ‘Fires low, boys half-asleep. Ice on the path, what would you? Needless to imperil oneself. What’s the hurry?’
‘We want her before she is beyond the age of childbearing,’ Mr Wriothesley breathes. ‘Ideally, in the next decade.’
Essex looks around. ‘Is Cromwell going for her? Won’t she be insulted, Majesty? She must know he was once a common shearsman, does she not?’
‘Barely that,’ he says. ‘I drove geese to market, my lord, and plucked them for the warm feather beds of earls.’
‘Oh, get on,’ Henry says. ‘Get on, Cromwell, make haste, what matter who does it?’
The gentlemen of the privy chamber look at him, shocked.
‘Sir,’ William Kingston says, ‘everything matters. Of this sort.’
Someone with presence of mind holds the door open, and Essex limps through. The king turns to him, his voice low and vehement: ‘I tell you, my lord, if it were not for fear of making a ruffle in the world, and driving her brother into the arms of the Emperor, I would not do what I must do this day, for none earthly thing.’ He lifts his head. ‘Gentlemen, let’s go.’
They keep a stately pace to the queen’s side, to allow the bride to arrive first: that is how royal people do it, a king waits for no one. In the queen’s closet Cranmer stands ready, his book in his hands, his stole about his neck. ‘Where is she?’
A rumbled jest from Brandon: ‘Perchance Essex died on the way?’
The king pretends not to have heard. He is dignified as a bridegroom must be; they never hear the sly asides of their companions, who hint that they will be happy when it is dark. Over his glittering gown the king wears a coat of indigo satin, furred. Light glints and slides from his many surfaces. His lips move, as if in prayer.
When Anne appears, she wears a gown strewn with flowers, like the king: hers are not silver, but pearl. Her blonde hair is loose, falling to her waist, and entwined around her coronet a garland of rosemary. She no longer looks like a grocer’s wife, but like what she is: a princess whose childhood was spent in a high castle on a crag, from where you can see for miles.
It is a short and simple ceremony. Nothing is required of her but to stand still and look cheerful. The archbishop glances around him, when he asks if any impediment is known: as if he offers chances to all comers. No one speaks. Cranmer bobs his head as if taking cover. The king makes his vows. Then at his archbishop’s signal, he turns, takes the queen by the elbows, and plants a kiss on her cheek. Stiffly, she turns her head; ducking around her winged head-dress, the king kisses the other cheek. The red lips are pursed, ready for him: but nothing doing.
Cranmer says, Deo Gratias. The king and queen leave the closet hand in hand. Fanfares sound. Courtiers cry, Gaudete! The councillors follow to the feast.
For once he hardly notices what he eats. Usually, after a dinner like this, the king’s councillors knot together in a corner and talk about hunting. But when the pipers come in Norfolk is prevailed upon to dance with his niece Katherine. Fitz watches him, gloomy. ‘I suppose this was worth getting out of bed to see?’
‘You will not dance, Lord Cromwell?’ Culpeper says. ‘If my lord Norfolk can, you can.’
Mr Wriothesley says, ‘If only Lady Latimer would come in. Then my lord would caper.’
‘You will not let that joke go,’ he says amiably. ‘Lord Latimer is younger than the king. And in health, as far as I know.’
Health and prosperity. Lady Latimer’s brother William became Baron Parr last year. And her sister, who served Jane the queen, is now a gentlewoman in the new queen’s privy chamber.
Norfolk’s niece giggles at her uncle’s show of high spirits. She is soon on her feet with the other maids: a lively dancer, her cheeks flushed. Into the fray go the young gentlemen, kicking up their heels. The king watches them with a tolerant smile. When they rise from the table, Henry holds out a hand to the queen, and leads her to the portrait that Hans has given him for a New Year gift. The councillors follow, like goslings in a line. A curtain is drawn back, revealing Edward the prince in red and gilt. Below his broad infantine forehead, under his feathered cap, his eyes glow. One open palm is held out; in the other he clutches his jewelled rattle, wielding it like a sceptre.
‘Master Holbein painted it,’ the king says; she understands that.
‘What a darling prince,’ she says. ‘When shall I meet him?’
‘Soon,’ the king promises.
‘And your lady daughters?’
‘Presently.’
‘And Lady Mary is to be wed?’
There is a hasty conference among the translators. An emphatic shake of the head makes Anna look sorry she spoke. The king turns to speak in French to the Cleves envoys. ‘We take pleasure in the company of the Duke of Bavaria. So there is no haste in the matter, and much to be discussed.’
He, Lord Cromwell, employs Italian, which Olisleger understands a little. His gesture cuts the air: drop it.
The king continues, showing off his son. ‘Edward is my heir. My daughters are not my heirs. Does she understand that?’ He turns back to the picture, his face softened. ‘That little chin of his, that is Jane’s.’
The king and queen part, bowing to each other, the queen turning towards her own rooms. The interpreters and the Cleves delegation set into each other, buzzing and elbowing. He leaves them to it and walks away. A message comes: the queen will speak with Lord Cromwell.
When he arrives Anna is still in her wedding dress. Norfolk’s niece is sitting on the floor, holding a needle and thread, an inch of the queen’s hem beneath her fingers. In her lap is Anne’s garland of rosemary. A knot of Cleves ladies are laughing in a corner. Jane Rochford gives him a nod. The queen takes off her wedding ring and shows it to him. Her chosen motto is written around it: God send me well to keep. What goose suggested that to her? It should have said, God send him well to keep.
‘Thank you for the cakes,’ the queen says. ‘We enjoyed them. A taste of home. You have visited my home?’
He is sorry to say he has not.
‘I hoped for letters at Calais. But there was nothing for me.’
Poor lady, she is homesick. ‘The posts are bad at this time of year,’ he says. ‘I myself am awaiting news from our ambassadors in France.’
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘so are we all. To know whether the amity continues. It seems harsh to wish for discord, when we have grown up praying for peace. But I know my brother Wilhelm would be relieved if the Emperor and the French king were to set about each other with their fists and teeth.’ She laughs.
‘War for them is peace for us,’ he says, ‘their discord our harmony.’ He realises she is not uninformed, or lacking in eloquence, and also that he can partly understand her. But he would not speak to her without an intermediary. He cannot afford to create a misunderstanding. It is risky enough even when the translators are doing their best.
‘Where is the young Gregory?’ she asks in English. ‘So well he entertained me in Calais. What a good boy.’
There is a murmur of pleasure and surprise from the ladies. ‘Well spoken, madam!’
Katherine Howard looks up from her work on the floor. ‘Can’t get the needle through. This stuff is as tough as hide. It needs some great bodkin.’
There is a little laughter, edgy. Mary Norris blushes, guessing at something unfit for maiden ears. Jane Rochford says, ‘Get the whole thing off her. She will not be wearing it again till it has been made over in our English fashion.’ She reaches down—a comradely gesture—and pulls the young Howard to her feet.
He is making his farewells, but Anna calls him back. She seems preoccupied with the fifty sovereigns he sent her, as if he might expect to be paid back. She explains she has broken the coins into those of lesser value and given some in largesse. Women came out of their houses, she explains, at—’
‘At Sittingbourne,’ Jane Rochford says.
‘—offering me delicacies to eat.’
He says to the interpreters, ‘Tell her whenever she issues out, she should carry suitable coins—or have them carried, in her case. She need not wait for gifts to be made her, but should hand them freely to bystanders. Be generous especially to children, as it stores up goodwill for the future.’
Jane Rochford is studying Anna’s lips as they move, as if to pick out the words. She is a woman with a good wit, he thinks, but she has never found a use for it; perhaps this is her time to shine. Soon the great ladies, Bess Cromwell included, will go home to their households and children, and Rochford will assist Lady Rutland with the queen’s daily round, keeping a hand on the young maids and ensuring order and piety.
One of the interpreters asks him, ‘My lord, what comes next?’
‘Evensong,’ he says. ‘Then the French ambassador will be joining us for Caesar’s invasion of Britain, with more bagpipes and drums; then it will be tumblers or magicians, then supper and bed.’
At twilight they play Britannia unconquered. The queen sits up straight and looks alert, while one of the interpreters rehearses to her what will unfold: the repulse of the Romans, how the island stood firm and resisted tribute. He recognises the King of Britain as one of George Boleyn’s men.
Henry will like the queen to see what manner of countrymen she has now: they refuse all slavery, detect all knavery. The monarch that was then, in Caesar’s time, armed the Thames itself, planting iron-tipped staves below the waterline to rip out the belly of the Roman ships. When the survivors hauled themselves to shore, the Britons butchered them.
There were ninety-nine kings, the chroniclers tell us, before we came to our present monarch. He suspects them of snipping sections out of history, so Henry makes one hundred.
‘I don’t suppose you have anything like this at home,’ the king says to Anna.
The remark is laboriously relayed to her.
No, she says. More is the pity. She looks bewildered.
The players take up their stance and menace each other with drawn blades. Solemnly, they perform the actions of fighting men, till those who are Romans fall to their knees and then judiciously, thoughtfully, checking the floor is clear, topple forward on their faces. The maids of honour nudge each other, laughing. The king glances over at them, and smiles, like a man reminiscing. He says to his wife, ‘Kings of Britain have conquered Rome.’
He, Lord Cromwell, keeps finding reasons to get up and walk about, to speak to one and then another. He views the queen from different angles and in different lights. Some expressions need no translator; he sees she is resolute, whatever the evening may bring. Behind the rampaging battle there is a pavilion made in twenty-six sections, with windows like a house. It was sewn over with ‘H&K’ but that has been unpicked. The walls are purple and gold, and the lining is of green sarcenet—which lends a spring-like air. ‘Anybody could issue forth from that tent,’ he says. ‘King Arthur himself would be proud.’
‘Is there much more of this?’ the French ambassador enquires.
The interlude comes, and everybody sits up. First a masque of lovers is played. Two gentlemen hold lyres, their expressions bereft, their garb sewn over with scallop shells: they are the heart’s pilgrims, they declare.
‘There are no other sorts of pilgrims now,’ Norfolk says. ‘Even Walsingham is down.’ He grimaces. ‘It seems to me this conceit is stale. The master of revels thinks to save a little money.’
‘I am all for that,’ he says.
Presently two maidens come out of the tent, and are kind to the swains. They dance a little jig together. ‘That’s my niece, Katherine,’ Norfolk says. ‘Edmund’s girl.’
‘I know.’
‘How do you like her?’
He has no opinion. The lovers hop away, arm in arm, and in come Friar Flip-Flap and Friar Snip-Snap, trying to pickpocket the spectators, till one races in with a dog and chases them. The dog’s name is Grime. He yearns towards dainties held out to him, and his keeper hauls him back. Beneath the keeper’s hood, a familiar face. ‘Is that Sexton? I thought I had banished that churl for good and all.’
The boy Culpeper says, ‘He must find some employment, I suppose. Nicholas Carew took him in but Carew is dead.’
Sexton leaves Grime to tussle with the friars, ambles off and comes back in another guise, his belly thrust out, wearing purple and with great sleeves like a ship’s sails. He is Privy Seal, he says, a man low born, whose dam and sire he hides in his sleeves for shame.
Anger washes through him like a wave, and out again. He says to Marillac, his neighbour, ‘It is an outworn jest, once made against the cardinal.’
‘Ah yes, your old master,’ Marillac says. ‘I was warned never to refer to him, but you use his name freely. Strange that people are still arguing over him. What is it, ten years?’
He points to Sexton. ‘You should have seen that fellow, how he screamed when he was parted from the cardinal and conveyed into the king’s service—I say “conveyed”, because we had to bind him and throw him in a cart.’
Sexton loops nooses around the necks of Snip-Snap and Flip-Flap. They stagger and protrude their tongues. He calls out, ‘Sexton! Beware! Perhaps I have a rope for you in my great sleeve.’
Sexton looks straight at him. ‘Tyburn is no jest, Tom. For him it is a jest,’ he points to the king, ‘and for her, and for me, but not for thee, Tom, not for thee.’
Grime is circling and about to crap. The king’s lips tighten. He makes a gesture: get dog and keeper out, remove friars too. Sexton runs, raising his knees high as if leaping over puddles.
The Britons come in again, to a spatter of applause, carrying the river Thames looped over their arms. Lord Morley sits forward on his stool: ‘Shall we have the war machines of the Emperor Claudius? Vespasian, and the Siege of Exeter?’
‘By my faith,’ Norfolk says, ‘it’s been a long day for us councillors, my lord. And the king will want to have the queen apart, will he not?’
‘There ought to be giants,’ Gregory says. ‘Gogmagog was twelve feet tall. He could rip up oak trees, no effort at all, it was like picking flowers. There was another giant, Retho by name, who made himself a great beard with the beards of men he had slain.’
‘Like Brandon, what?’ Norfolk says. He laughs with pure delight. It is once a decade he makes a joke.
The Thames unrolls, a length of patchy blue. To aid the players, the maids seize the ends and ripple it. Lord Morley says, ‘I am afraid a great part of the story is missed. Britain had kings before Christ was incarnate. You will find it all in Geoffrey of Monmouth, his book.’
He says, ‘My lord, I have read that not all those princes were lucky, and few of them were wise.’ There was the prince who drowned in the river Humber, which they named after him. There was Bladus, who flew over London on home-made wings: they had to scrape him off the pavements. Rivallo was a good king, or well-intentioned at least: but during his time it rained blood, and swarms of flies ate Englishmen alive. And if you go further back, the nation was founded on a murder: Trojan Brutus, father of us all, killed his own father. A hunting accident, they claimed, but perhaps there are no accidents. Those mis-aimed arrows, and the ones that bend in flight: they know their target.
Gregory says, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth, he was such a liar. I wager he wasn’t even born in Monmouth. I wager he was never there in his life.’
The queen stands up, at some invisible signal or perhaps some inner prompting. Her ladies rise and flock about her. The Howard child has to be nudged; she is gaping at a lutenist with a well-turned leg. The evening is winding to its conclusion. The musicians will play the king to his own chamber and then put away their timpani and viols. Henry’s face shows nothing, except traces of fatigue. Mr Wriothesley bends and speaks into his ear: ‘Do you wish you could read his thoughts, sir?’
‘No.’
The privy chamber gentlemen rise and follow the king. The clergy are assembling to go in procession and bless the bed. Every night the king’s sheets are sprinkled with holy water, but tonight he needs Heaven’s special regard: the attention of the angels and saints, fixed on his privy member. Culpeper says, in passing, ‘Now all he has to do is climb aboard and make a Duke of York.’
The king has had a new bed made, very wonderfully carved. He, Lord Cromwell, cannot lie still in his old one, but must walk about. The palace is quiet. Fires are damped. He encounters no one but guards who salute him, and two giddy young lords, wearing red and yellow masquing bonnets, one dancing while the other claps. At the sight of him the dancer skids to a halt. The beat is missed, trapped between his friend’s palms.
‘Go to your cribs,’ he tells them. ‘If you are lucky, in the morning I shall have forgotten your names.’
Abashed, they pass him their bonnets, as if they do not know what else to do with them. ‘They are hats for Tartars, my lord.’
They ought to have strings or ribbons, he remarks. You would think the wind would pluck them off, as they gallop the snowy wastes.
The boys ramble away, arms linked. He calls after them, ‘Pray for me.’ He hears their laughter as they sway downstairs.
He walks back to his rooms, closes his door. Give a man a Tartar hat and he will try it on, whether he has a mirror or no. But he is out of heart. He leaves the hat on Christophe’s pallet, so when he wakes he will think he is still dreaming. All night, in his broken sleep, his countrymen fight Caesar’s legions: slow, dogged, their movements enmired.
He is up at dawn, sitting down in his chambers with Richard Riche to talk about the surrender of the abbey at Malvern. Riche is yawning. ‘I wonder…’ he says, and breaks off.
‘Shall we just keep our mind on the figures?’ Christophe comes in with pots of small beer. He is wearing the Tartar hat and Riche says, ‘Why is he…’ His sentences keep failing him, as if they are lost in mist.
A messenger comes in, sent straight up in his boots, blue-nosed and splashed from the road. ‘Urgent, my lord. From York, for your hand.’
‘Jesus spare us,’ Riche says. ‘Don’t tell me the countryside is up again?’
‘Too early in the year, I think.’ The seal is already broken; he wonders why. He reads: York’s treasurer says he will have to shut down his office if he does not get two thousand pounds by the week’s end and as much again to follow: the bills have come in for the harbour at Bridlington, and the northern lords are clamouring for the pay-out of their yearly grants and pensions.
Norfolk stamps in. ‘Cromwell? You see that from Tristram Teshe?’
He glares at Norfolk; then at the messenger, who avoids his eye. ‘By Our Lady,’ Norfolk says, ‘Teshe should take those barons by their napes and shake the living Jesus out of them. If it were me, I would make them wait for their money till Lady Day.’
Fitzwilliam is on Norfolk’s heels, sour and not yet shaven. ‘If he tries to hold them off, my lord, some of them may ride over to the Scots. Or exact payment by plundering it.’
Mr Wriothesley comes in. ‘From Wyatt, sir.’ He has opened the letter already. François and Charles are still together, prolonging the season of goodwill. ‘Wyatt says the Emperor looks like thunder whenever our realm is mentioned.’
‘Not surprising,’ he says. ‘Our king well-married, and no thanks to him.’
He strides out towards the king’s presence chamber and his arms fill with petitions from courtiers, with letters and bills. He hands them back to Wriothesley, to Rafe. A pity that neither Rafe nor Richard Cromwell was on the privy chamber rota last night; then he would have been sure of good information. Perhaps he should have arranged that? He says to himself, I cannot think of everything. He hears the king’s voice saying, why not?
The Cleves delegation is there before him. They are spry and hopeful, and declare they have heard Mass already. ‘And,’ they say, ‘we have a present for you, Lord Cromwell, to mark this auspicious day.’
The Duke of Saxony, Wilhelm’s brother-in-law, has sent him a clock. Taking it, he murmurs his appreciation. It is the neatest he has seen, perhaps the smallest—a drum-shaped object you can hold in your palm. The English gentlemen are playing with it, passing it from hand to hand, when the king comes in. ‘Sir, present it to him,’ Rafe whispers.
The Germans nod regretfully; they understand this sort of sacrifice. Henry takes the clock from his hand without looking at it. He goes on talking to one of his privy chamber gentlemen: ‘… fetch back Edmund Bonner, as I have promised, and send my brother of France an envoy more agreeable and modest.’ He breaks off. Turns to the Cleves ambassadors: ‘Gentlemen, you will be pleased to know…’
‘Yes, Majesty?’ They are eager.
‘… I have sent the queen her morgengabe, as I think you call it, a gift in accordance with the custom of your country. We will let you have written details of the value.’
They are hoping to hear more. But the king has closed his lips. He does not even mention the clock. Normally he would be delighted by such a novelty—would examine its workings and ask for another one, this time with his portrait in the lid. But instead he looks down at it with a sigh, a mechanical smile, and hands it on to one of his suite. ‘Thank you, my lord Cromwell, you always have something new. Though sometimes not as new as one would wish.’
There is a heartbeat’s pause. Henry nods to him: ‘Come apart.’
He stares at the king. Disassemble? Disperse? Then he recovers himself. ‘Yes. Of course.’ He follows.
Sometimes with the king it is best to be brisk and show yourself a good fellow. As if you were elbow to elbow at the Well with Two Buckets, sharing a pint of Spanish wine. He thinks, I’d knock it back if I had some. Or Rhenish. Aqua Vitae. Walter’s beer. ‘How liked you the queen?’
The king says, ‘I liked her not well before, but now I like her much worse.’
Henry glances back over his shoulder. No one has approached them. They are alone, as in a wasteland.
Henry says, ‘Her breasts are slack and she has loose skin on her belly. When I felt it, it struck me to the heart. I had no appetite for the rest. I do not believe she is a maid.’
What the king is saying is preposterous. ‘Majesty, she has never strayed from her mother’s side…’
He steps back. He wants to walk away: for his own protection. He sees from the corner of his eye that Dr Chambers and Dr Butts have come in, with their modest caps, their long gowns. The king says, ‘I will speak with those gentlemen. No word of this should escape.’
No words escape from him, as he draws back from the king’s path. And no one addresses him, but clears his way, as he walks the length of the presence chamber and through the guard chamber and passes from view.
The two physicians are the first to seek him out. He is reading Wyatt’s letter, and lays it aside with the scenes it conjures, distant but clear. Wyatt is a presence even when he is absent, especially when he is absent. His letters are close narratives of diplomatic encounters. Yet, however tight you pin your attention to the page, you feel that something is escaping you, slipping into the air; then some other reader comes along, and reads it different.
Butts clears his throat. ‘My lord Cromwell, like you we are forbidden by the king to speak.’
‘What is there to say? We would speculate about the queen’s maidenhead. Such talk belongs to chaplains in confession, if it belongs anywhere at all.’
‘Very well,’ Butts says. ‘Now you know, and I know, and the king knows, that in such unmentionable matters he has been wrong before. He took the dowager Katherine to be untouched, though she had been wed to his brother. Later, he thought the contrary.’
Chambers says, ‘He thought Boleyn was a virgin, then he found she was unchaste since her French days.’
Butts says, ‘He knows the breasts and belly are evidence of naught. But just this morning he is ashamed and out of heart. When next he tries her it may be a different result.’
Chambers frowns: ‘You think so, brother?’
‘All men do sometimes fail,’ Butts says. ‘You need not look as though that is news to you, Lord Cromwell.’
‘My concern,’ he says, ‘is that he does not make this accusation again, that she is no maid. Because if he does I have to act upon it. However, if he says he mislikes her, has a distaste for her person—’
‘He does.’
‘—if he admits he has failed with her—’
‘—then perhaps you have a different sort of problem,’ Butts says.
‘I do not believe he has spoken to anyone,’ Chambers says, ‘except us. One or two of the privy chamber, possibly. His chaplain.’
‘But we fear the news will soon spread,’ Butts says. ‘Look at his face. Would anyone take him for a happy bridegroom?’
Also, he wonders, has Anna confided in anyone? He says, ‘I had better try and cheer him.’ Nagging at his attention is the treasure he needs to dispatch to York. He thinks, I do not want to be with Henry but I cannot risk his being with anyone else. I will have to dog his footsteps like the devil. He says, ‘What shall I tell the ambassadors of Cleves?’
‘Need you tell them anything? Let the queen speak for herself.’
Chambers says, ‘I do not think she will make any complaint. She is too well-bred. And innocent, perhaps.’
‘Or,’ Butts says, ‘perhaps of sufficient sense to see that a bad beginning may be recouped. I have advised the king to keep to his own chamber tonight. By abstinence, appetite may increase.’
‘Time was when they used to display the bedsheets,’ Chambers says. ‘It is lucky those days have passed.’
But the king’s looks tell the tale. Thinks of all the people who crowded into the room at Rochester, to see him nourish love. At the first moment he saw Anna, he saw himself in the mirror of her eyes. From that instant it was written that there would never be love or affection between them. From that time he had no curiosity as to what he would find under her clothes: just teats and her slot, pouches of skin and hair.
He seeks out Jane Rochford. ‘Our opinion is, nothing happened,’ she says.
‘What does Anna say?’
‘Anna says nothing. Did you think we would fetch the men in this morning, to interpret?’
‘There are women who can do it.’ There are: because he has found some.
Jane says, ‘I think it is better if she keeps her own counsel and we keep ours, yes? If he has failed, no one wants to know that, surely? What can you do with the information?’
‘You are right,’ he says. ‘It is of no value. Therefore, take heed, it should have no currency.’
Rochford turns back to him, as if relenting. She says, ‘He lay on her, is our view. I think he put his fingers in her. C’est tout.’
The council meets. No messages have come from the queen. Her own people, both ladies and gentlemen, have visited her and come away looking unperturbed. It is clear that we are living in a dual reality, such as experienced courtiers can maintain. For many years now, more years than we can count, the King of England has been a fair youth. So often, he has been married, and then unmarried; and the dead have been in Purgatory, and plaster saints have moved their eyes. Now the councillors shoulder their double burden: their knowledge of the king’s failure, and their pretence that he has never in all his days met with anything but success.
‘We should not be discouraged,’ the Bishop of Durham suggests. ‘Allow a little time. Nature will take its course.’
Norfolk looks puzzled; surely Tunstall is no friend to Germans? Tunstall says, ‘I find no fault with the lady. Whatever her brother may be, she is not herself a Lutheran. And perhaps it is time, for England’s sake, to reconcile our differences, through her person.’
Norfolk says, ‘If Henry could take some air in the day it might go better at night. Skulking by the fire with a book will not help him.’
Fitzwilliam says, ‘Unless a book of bawdy. That might.’
Edward Seymour says, ‘He never had trouble in my sister’s day.’
‘Not that you know of,’ Norfolk says.
‘But he loved her,’ Cranmer says, his voice low.
Norfolk snorts. Seymour says, ‘True. That match was for love, this for policy. But I agree with Bishop Tunstall. I see nothing wrong with her.’
Riche says, ‘There is nothing. Except his dislike.’
Bishop Sampson says, ‘The king being as he is, you took a gamble, Lord Cromwell.’
He says coldly, ‘I acted for good and sufficient reason. If I promoted the match, it was with his full permission and encouragement.’
Cranmer says, ‘It may be … and it is only my own opinion…’
‘Do not make us drag it from you,’ Fitzwilliam says.
‘… there are those who believe every act of copulation a sin—’
‘I did not think the king was among them,’ Tunstall says pleasantly.
‘—though a sin that, of necessity, God will forgive—yet one must come to the act, not only with intent to engender—’
‘Which the king surely does,’ Lord Audley says.
‘—but also with the object of a pure merging of heart and soul, arising from a free consent—’
‘You’ve lost me,’ Suffolk says.
‘So if he, or she, were to have any reservation, in mind or in heart—then to the scrupulous, an impediment might appear—’
Audley cuts him off. ‘What impediment? You mean the pre-contract?’
Cranmer whispers, ‘The king has read a great deal in the Church Fathers.’
‘And later commentators,’ Bishop Sampson says. ‘Who are not always helpful, tending to dispute how men sin and in which way, when they are abed. But sin they do.’
‘Even with their wives?’ Suffolk looks stricken.
Sampson says, with dry malice, ‘That is possible.’
‘Bollocks,’ Norfolk says. ‘Cromwell, is that in the scriptures?’
‘Why doesn’t your lordship try reading them?’
Audley clears his throat. All the councillors turn in his direction. ‘Just be clear. His incapacity—’
‘Or unwillingness—’ Cranmer adds.
‘—or unwillingness—is it anything to do with the papers from Cleves, or not?’
Cranmer will not commit. ‘Scruples are of various sorts.’
‘So will it be helped by getting the papers?’ Riche asks.
‘It couldn’t hurt, could it?’ Bishop Sampson says. ‘Of course by then it will be Lent. And he will not sleep with her in Lent.’
‘We shouldn’t be talking like this.’ Suffolk looks stern. ‘We are men, not gossiping housewives. We lack respect for our sovereign lord.’
Fitzwilliam slaps the table. ‘You know it is me he blames? He says I should have stopped her at Calais. I wrote to him she was like a princess, and she is. Nothing else was in question. Is it for me to feel her duckies and write home my opinion, and send it by post horse and boat?’
The door opens. It is Call-Me. He looks as if he is walking on hot pebbles. ‘Get out!’ Norfolk bellows. ‘Interrupting the council!’
Call-Me says, ‘The king. He is coming this way.’
They stand, with a scraping of stools. Henry’s eyes pass over them. ‘Squabbling?’
‘Yes,’ Brandon says sadly.
He cuts in: ‘Your Majesty values concord, and rightly. But I cannot and never will come into concord with those who give wrong advice.’
Charles Brandon says, ‘But it is very good of you to join us, sir. We did not look for you. We hardly expected you. We rejoice to see you. We—’
‘Yes, enough, Charles,’ Henry says. ‘It is time we talked about the Duke of Bavaria, his suit to my lady daughter.’
‘Bless him,’ Charles Brandon says: as if the young duke were sick.
‘My lord Privy Seal,’ the king says, ‘you and Bavaria went up to see the Lady Mary, did you not? And then of course, she was fetched to Baynard’s Castle, and she and the duke were permitted some discourse. That would have been about Christmas Eve?’
The king talks as if there is some mystery, and he is trying to penetrate it. He bows his assent: yes, all that is true. Philip had wished to present Mary with a great cross of diamonds, but the councillors had deterred him. If the match were not to go ahead, would a present of such value need to be returned? It is a sticky point of protocol. Word went out to the goldsmiths, and a cross of lesser value was found.
The Lady Mary had walked with Duke Philip in a bare winter garden at Westminster, where life was shrunk to its roots. They had spoken: partly though an interpreter, partly in Latin.
When the cross was presented, Mary had kissed it. And kissed Philip. On the cheek. ‘Which is a good sign, by God,’ Brandon says. ‘For she never kissed any of us.’
‘You have not the rank,’ the king says. ‘That traitor Exeter was the last who did. Being her cousin.’
Bishop Sampson leans forward, frowning. ‘Philip is not her cousin, is he? Or if he is, in what degree?’ He jots a note to himself.
Henry says, ‘It appears to me our friendship with the German states would be greatly strengthened if we made this match.’
There is silence. The king half-smiles. He has always prided himself on the surprises he gives his councillors. ‘If I can sacrifice myself for England, why not my daughter? If I must breed for my nation, why cannot she? I am assured by Cromwell she will be conformable. He always gives me that assurance, and yet nothing ever comes of it. Bishop Sampson, perhaps you would go to her, and prepare her for marriage?’
Sampson compresses his lips. He can barely force a nod.
He, Thomas Cromwell, says, ‘In Europe they are claiming the marriage is already made, and against the lady’s will. Vaughan says Antwerp is talking about it. Marillac believes it, or pretends to. The word has gone out to François.’
Henry says, ‘They think I would enforce her?’
‘Yes.’
Henry stares at him. ‘And?’
‘And so I think, your Majesty not offended, you had better reverse your intentions, disappoint the duke, and bid him a swift journey home. Otherwise you will be doing exactly what your foes expect. Which is never good policy.’
Edward Seymour covers his mouth. Mirth escapes.
Henry is silent, mouth pursed. Then he says, ‘Very well. I shall do something else for Philip. The Garter, perhaps.’ He rubs the bridge of his nose. ‘You had better not close off his hopes. Tell him he may return. Tell him I shall always be glad to see him, at some date not yet decided.’
‘Majesty, your daughter will never marry,’ Norfolk says. ‘Cromwell breaks every match proposed for her.’
The king gets up. He rubs his chest with one hand, steadies himself with the other. They are all on their feet, ready to kneel: sometimes he exacts it, sometimes not. Norfolk offers, ‘My arm, Majesty?’
‘What use is that?’ Henry says. ‘I could better hold you up, Thomas Howard, than you me.’
The door is flung wide for the king’s exit. Call-Me falters in, and hovers. Only then do they notice that the Duke of Suffolk is still seated at the council board. He rocks to and fro on his stool. ‘Poor Harry, poor Harry,’ he moans. Tears course down his cheeks.
On 7 January the king sleeps alone, as his doctors have advised. For the next two nights, his gentlemen escort him to the queen’s rooms.
Dr Butts comes to him. ‘Lord Cromwell, it is all naught. I have told his Majesty not to enforce himself.’
‘In case injury comes to his royal person,’ Chambers says.
‘He says he will still go to her suite every other night,’ Dr Butts says. ‘So it will give rise to no talk.’
Chambers says, ‘He claims she has displeasant airs about her. You might talk to her chamberwomen. See if they are washing her well enough.’
He says, ‘You go to them if you like.’ He pictures them sousing and soaping Anna, scrubbing her in the Thames and beating her on stones; hauling her up and wringing her. ‘I would stake my life she is a virgin.’
‘He seems to have dropped that line of talk,’ Chambers says. ‘Now he only says she disgusts him. But he claims he is capable of the act itself. Or capable of emission, at least. Which will be a relief to you to know, if you have to take him to market again.’
Dr Butts whispers: ‘He has experienced … you understand us … duas pollutiones nocturnas in somne.’
‘So he thinks he could do it with another woman,’ Chambers says.
‘Has he anyone in mind?’ He thinks, I am like Charles Brandon: I am ashamed to hold such conversation.
At the next council meeting the Lord Chancellor says, ‘If the king and queen are civil to each other by day, it will help counter the rumours. And I think we can rely on them for that.’
‘When he was with the other one,’ Fitz says, ‘and he couldn’t tup her, he blamed witches.’
‘Superstition,’ Cranmer says. ‘He knows better now.’
Norfolk says, ‘Well, Cromwell? What to do?’
He says, ‘I have done nothing, but for his safety and happiness.’
He overhears a young courtier—it is a Howard of course, the young Culpeper: ‘If the king cannot manage it with the new queen, Cromwell will do it for him. Why not? He does everything else.’
His friend laughs. What alarms him is not their mockery. It is that they take no care to keep their voices low.
When the council meets they should, he feels, put down sand to soak up the blood. It is like the champ clos for a tournament, sturdily fenced to stop the spectators getting in or the combatants getting out. The king stands in a watchtower, judging every move.
That night he writes to Stephen Vaughan. He tells him what he tells everyone abroad: the king and queen are merry, and all here believe the marriage a great success.
I am lying even to Vaughan, he thinks.
Richard Riche asks him, ‘What do you hear from your daughter in Antwerp?’
‘Nothing,’ he says.
Riche says, ‘It may be as well. The king has a sharp nose for heresy. Of course, my lord, since you have been such a traveller in this world, you may have other offspring, unknown to you. Do you ever think of that?’
‘Yes, Wolsey mentioned it a time or two.’ He thinks, if Jenneke made a claim on me now, I don’t know if I could meet it. He ushers Riche out as Wriothesley comes in. Clearly he has been eavesdropping on Riche, because his face is flushed. He says, ‘That man has no feeling at all. He is a tissue of ambition.’
He thinks, but that is what Riche tells me about you. But while I rule, you do your best for me, and your best is very good. I must place my trust, even if I have misgivings. I cannot work alone. The Seymour boys have their own interests at heart, why would they not? In these strange times Suffolk is my well-wisher, but Suffolk is stupid. I cannot count on Fitzwilliam for support, he is busy defending his own position, and blames me because he is blamed. Cranmer is frightened, he is always frightened. Latimer is disgraced. Robert Barnes I would not trust with his own life, let alone mine. Manuals of advice tell us you should fear weak men more than strong men. But we are all weak, in the presence of the king. Even Thomas Wyatt, who can face down a lion.
A realm’s chief councillor should have a grand plan. But now he’s pushing through, hour to hour, not raising his head from his business. The city is full of Germans—official, unofficial—who believe that he will make the king a fit ally for Luther. Lord Cromwell, they coax, we know that it is you who day by day softens the force of last summer’s laws. ‘We know in your heart you wish a more perfect reformation. You believe what we believe.’
He indicates the king, standing at a distance: ‘I believe what he believes.’
At Austin Friars he goes out to see his leopard. Dick Purser knows the beast’s habits, her sullen whims, her episodes of dangerous friskiness. ‘Dick,’ he says, ‘you mustn’t think you can get friendly with her. You mustn’t think you can let her out.’
He looks at the brute and she looks back at him. Her golden eyes blink. She yawns, but all the time she is thinking of murder. She gives herself away by the twitching of her tail.
Dick says, ‘What would she say if she could speak?’
‘Nothing we would understand.’
‘I never thought I would be keeper of such a beast, that day you came to get me from More’s house.’
He puts his arm around the boy’s shoulders. Dick Purser is an orphan; it was More and Bishop Stokesley who hunted and hounded his father, setting him in the pillory and shaming him as a heretic, and it was their ill-treatment, he is sure, that killed him. More wanted credit for taking in the boy; and credit again, for whipping heresy out of him. Sir Thomas bragged he had never struck his own children, not even with a feather. But he did not extend the courtesy to the children of others.
He himself had turned up, dry-mouthed with rage, on More’s doorstep. He would not send a servant to do it, nor would he wait in the outer hall for More to be at leisure. ‘I’ve come for Purser’s son. Give him to me, or I’ll lay a complaint against you for assault.’
‘What?’ More said. ‘For correcting a child of the house? People will laugh at you, Master Cromwell. Anyway, the rascal has vanished. Fortunately he took only what he stood up in. Or charges would lie.’
‘I hear he took your blessing. You could see the marks.’
‘He’s probably run to your house,’ More said. ‘Where would he seek shelter, but a heretic roof?’
‘Beware an action for slander,’ he said: one lawyer to another.
‘Bring one,’ More said. ‘The facts would be aired. Your book trade connections. Your dubious associates. Antwerp, all that. No … you go home, you’ll find the wretch at your gate. Where else would he go?’
To the wharves, he thinks, to the docks. To take ship. To do what I did. He could do worse. Or then again perhaps he couldn’t.
Now he pays Dick Purser twelve pounds a year. He gets fourpence daily for the leopard’s keep.
He goes to see Lord Rutland, Chamberlain of the Queen’s Household. Their conversation is circumlocutory, but Lord Rutland is clear that he does not meddle in bedroom matters.
He will speak to his wife, he offers. Lady Rutland speaks to the senior lady among the Germans. Next day Anna leaves off her bonnet and appears in a French hood, the oval framing her face and showing off her pretty fair hair.
He says to Jane Rochford, ‘Is there a colour that would make her skin look fresher? The king keeps mentioning Jane.’
‘Jane was not fresh,’ Rochford says, ‘she was pallid. She looked as if she lived under an altar cloth. Not that she was so holy. She spent her time frightening Anne Boleyn.’
Mary Fitzroy says, ‘You cannot expect the queen to glow, my lord. She hears the king is unhappy, and the more English she learns, the more explanation she will require.’
‘Oh, I don’t think she will,’ the child Katherine Howard says. ‘She has heard that the king’s first wife was divorced because she kept asking God to pardon him, using a loud voice in Latin. And that he killed Anne Boleyn because she gossiped and shrieked. And that his third wife was beloved because she hardly talked at all. Therefore she aims to imitate Jane. Only not die.’
Rochford says, ‘Perhaps you’d like to come in yourself, my lord, and wash and dress her? We’ll stand her naked before you, and you can do the rest.’
He says, ‘If she confides in you, come to me.’
Through the interpreters he learns what Anna expects of marriage. Her parents did not marry for love, but love followed. They wrote poems for each other. She understands the king has written verses in his time, and wonders when he will write one for her.
The ambassadors of Cleves ask, ‘This long while past, when your king was without a wife, did he take mistresses?’
‘Our king is virtuous,’ he says.
‘We do not doubt it,’ the ambassadors say. ‘Though there could be other reasons.’
He says to Fitzwilliam, ‘Advise the king to make some public demonstration of his affection.’
‘You do it,’ Fitz says.
‘No, you.’
Fitz groans.
Later that day, before his assembled court and the Germans, Henry calls for the queen, takes her by the hand. ‘Come, dear madam.’ He looks around his councillors—their faces, willing him on.
He grapples her to him. Anna’s forehead rests against his gem-studded breast. As if she might struggle, the king holds her fast. As if she might escape, he tightens his grip.
Anna’s body is rigid, flattened. Her mouth is buried in his furs. She attempts to twist sideways, so she can breathe. Her hand, bunching up her skirts, contracts into a fist. Her head strains backwards. She emits a gasp. Then, her back to the witnesses, she is silent.
Gregory whispers, ‘Perhaps he has killed her?’
Wriothesley says, ‘Majesty … would it be best if…?’
‘What?’ Henry releases the queen. He steps back as if to say, there now—you all saw I tried.
Anna peels away from him. She seems unsteady. Her gaze flutters to Fitzwilliam, to Gregory, to the men she knows, and she moves stiffly towards them, a hand extended, limp as if the fingers were broken. Branded in her cheek is the imprint of the king’s gold chain.
By the end of January Wyatt has obeyed the orders that come from London by every messenger, carried on every tide. He has put in the tip of his knife to prise open a gap between the Emperor and François.
Wyatt has appeared before Charles, the occasion public and grand. Why, he asks the Emperor, do you not keep your promises? We have extradition treaties, and yet you allow English traitors free passage to join that monster, Pole. Are you so ungrateful for all my king has done for you?
‘Ungrateful? I?’ The first gentleman of Christendom flashes into rage. His councillors, in shock, pull back into a huddle and confer. One of them steps forward: ‘Perhaps we have misunderstood you, Monsieur Guiett? Or perhaps you misspoke? After all, French is not your first language.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with my French,’ Wyatt says. ‘But I can repeat it in Latin if you like.’
Charles leans forward. How dare your master use that word, ungrateful? How can a charge of ingratitude be levelled against an Emperor, by the envoy of some poor little island full of heretics and sheep? An inferior person, a king, cannot expect gratitude. The Holy Roman Emperor is set above mere kings. Their natural position is at his feet.
Wyatt draws back. ‘All is said, sir.’ In seeking to insult Henry, the Emperor has insulted all princes, his French ally included.
When Wyatt’s letter arrives Mr Wriothesley reads it out. ‘It is like a play!’ William Kingston says. A tentative smile spreads over the faces of the councillors. There are matters that lie between François and Charles—old quarrels—always ready to spark. Once the fire takes hold and burns their treaties, Englishmen can sleep safe.
‘Then, Cromwell,’ Norfolk says to him, ‘we will not need your German friends, will we? Your friend Wyatt works contrary to your purpose.’ The duke enjoys the thought. ‘Should he succeed, what a fool you will look.’
At Valenciennes on the river Scheldt, Charles and François part company. The Emperor takes a power and moves east. ‘And Wyatt with him,’ he says to Henry. At his elbow to needle him.
For a day or two they are without news. Then it becomes clear that Charles is heading towards his rebel city of Ghent. The citizens know what to expect. Charles has already executed one of their leaders, a man of seventy-five, by putting him on a rack and pulling his body apart: having shaved him first, trunk and poll, so that he was bald as a newborn babe.
Henry says, ‘The Emperor loves warfare. When he leaves Ghent he will march on Guelders. And Duke Wilhelm will call on my aid, which I cannot well deny him. And if I were to be drawn into war, it would not be by my desire, my lord Cromwell, but—strangely—by yours.’
Richard Riche comes to consult him about the pensions list for Westminster Abbey. The abbot says he is dying, but perhaps this is a ploy to get a better pension? The abbey is to be a cathedral now, and (if he lives) the abbot will be its dean. Henry will not demolish the sacred place where kings are crowned. Nor will he disturb his mother and father, who lie in bronze above ground, and below ground in lead; all day candles stout as pillars flicker around them, bathing them in a greenish perpetual light. The abbey’s relics will be moved, but images and statues survive. Doubting Thomas kneels to put his fingers into the bloody gash in his Saviour’s breast. St Christopher carries his God, who crouches on his shoulders like a favourite cat. On the walls of the chapter house, St John sails to Patmos, a forlorn exile blotting his eyes. The useful camel and the dromedary pace the desert sands, while the roebuck tramples verdure beneath delicate hooves, and the patriarchs and virgins stand shoulder to shoulder with the confessors and martyrs, their beady eyes alert. The monuments of dead monarchs draw together, as if their bones were counselling each other; and the prophetic pavements beneath them, those stones of onyx, porphyry, green serpentine and glass, advise us through their inscriptions how many years the world will last.
‘Why do they need to know?’ he asks Richard Riche. ‘It’s a wonder to me any of the monks could live past thirty.’ As their rule forbids them to consume flesh in their refectory, they keep a second dining room, where they can satisfy their appetites for roast and boiled meats. At the solemn feasts of the church, they make a dish they call Principal Pudding. They use six pounds of currants, three hundred eggs, and great bricks of suet. They showed it him once as it was getting ready, as if they were giving him a treat: a fatty, oozing mass, a welling bolster speckled black as if with flies. ‘It is worth suppressing the abbey,’ he says, ‘to suppress the pudding.’
He, Thomas Cromwell, stands looking up at the fan vaulting of the new chapel. ‘I swear the pendants are shifting. When I was first here they looked true.’
‘It is only the building settling,’ the monks say. ‘It happens, my lord.’
There is an indulgence granted to those who attend a Mass here, which all of us will need one day: it is called the Stairway to Heaven. St Bernard in a vision saw souls ascending, rung by rung into eternity; angels give them a hand to balance, as they hop off the last rung into bliss. It is easy to climb. Harder to know what to do when you get to the top. As we labour upwards, the Fiend shakes the foot; and treads can snap, or the whole structure sink in boggy ground. He says to Riche, ‘Ricardo, do you think there is a flaw in the nature of ladders, or a flaw in the nature of climbers?’ But it is not the sort of question to which the Master of Augmentations likes to apply his mind.
At the end of the month Edward Seymour goes to Calais, Rafe Sadler to Scotland. If King James wants a favour, he tells Rafe, he should cultivate his uncle Henry, rather than embroil himself with François, who will use Scotland as a vassal state. And if Rafe can detect any rift between James and the Pope, he should widen it. The King of Scots should be shown the advantages of taking control of his own church, and alerted to the resources of his monasteries: every ruler wants money, and here it is for the taking.
Rafe’s journey is slowed because he has to take a string of geldings, which the king wishes to present to his nephew.
‘Write to me,’ he says, ‘at every opportunity.’
The loss of the boy is like a cold wind on his neck.
When the court moves to Westminster, they go by river, accompanied by merchant ships, musicians aboard. A salute is fired from the Tower. The citizens line the trembling banks and cheer.
At Westminster the king continues to visit the queen every second night. The Germans ask, ‘Majesty, when will the coronation be?’ He, Cromwell, reminds the council it was planned for Candlemas; but Candlemas is past. Norfolk says, ‘We know why you want her crowned. You think once the king’s laid out the money, he won’t send her back.’
‘Send her back?’ He has to simulate outrage.
From the queen’s side of the palace, silence. The women brush by him frowning: there is always somewhere they have to be. There’s a question he ought to be asking Anna, but he doesn’t know what it is; or perhaps an answer that she needs from him. In stories, when you are in the forest you meet a lady, veiled and shrouded, and she asks you a riddle. If you get it right her clothes fall off at a glance. Her body glides into your arms, and her light merges with yours. But if you get it wrong she withers into a hag. She puts her hand on your member and it shrinks to the size of a bean.
He brings Charles Brandon to Austin Friars. He shows him the leopard, with which Charles is well pleased, and then takes him into his confidence: the king now affirms that as he will never love the queen he cannot do the act. ‘Cannot, will not—to the state, it is all one.’
Suffolk looks grave. ‘Given up completely, has he? I didn’t know that. Does Thomas Howard know? Do the bishops know? Any other man, you could suggest…’
He cannot imagine what Charles is going to say.
‘You could suggest, try thinking about another woman. But if Harry thought of another woman, he’d want to marry her. Then where would you be?’
At court he studies Norfolk’s niece. When a man’s eyes rest on her, which is very often, she ruffles her feathers like a plump little hen.
Thomas Howard is to go to France, the king says. He wants to penetrate the mind of François and thinks a great nobleman might succeed. ‘It needs someone of my Lord Norfolk’s stature,’ he says.
Young Surrey says to his hangers-on, ‘It is only by Heaven’s providence that the king has a nobleman left to send. Cromwell would extinguish us all, if he had his way.’
Wriothesley pursues him: ‘Sir, you see Norfolk is eager to begin his mission? When before, sent abroad, he always dragged his feet? And I fear his French is not adequate.’
‘Perhaps he will stay quiet and get a name for wisdom.’
Richard Riche says, ‘You might try that sometime, Call-Me.’
Norfolk will have the support of Sir John Wallop, now appointed resident ambassador. Valloppe, the French call him. He is an experienced diplomat, but he would not have been the Cromwell choice: too friendly with Lisle, for one thing. He has his boy Mathew in Calais now, so he knows what goes on in the Lord Deputy’s house. He is waiting for one incriminating letter to turn up on his lordship’s desk, or perhaps in her ladyship’s sewing box—a letter to, or from, Reginald Pole.
In the days before he embarks, Norfolk is seen at Gardiner’s house in Southwark. ‘It is natural my lord should take advice,’ he says equably, when reports are brought to him. ‘Because Gardiner was our ambassador in France for so long.’
‘It is not that,’ Wriothesley says. ‘They are working something together.’
‘Yes. Well. I am working something myself.’
When Norfolk sees the surprise I have for him, he will never stir from his hearth again.
The Lenten fast of 1540 is kept in the strict old manner, under the eye of Gardiner and his friends. It is as well to let them have their way in small things, where they are vigilant. Thurston gets them through on saffron bread, onion tarts with raisins, baked rice with almond milk, and a new sauce for salt fish made with garlic and walnuts.
On Valentine’s Day, preaching wars break out. Gardiner against Barnes, Barnes against Gardiner. They are both bitter men, but Gardiner has nothing to lose, while Barnes stands in peril of his life. Barnes will break, as he once did before Wolsey. It’s not his faith, but his temperament that will fail. He is not Luther. Here he stands: till Gardiner knocks him across the room.
The Londoners, crouching under makeshift shelters, jostling beneath oiled canvases, listen to their sermons with their eyes screwed up against the rain, their hair plastered and their ears a-swill. Yet old wives say we shall have a hot summer. For now, as the poet says, no fresh green leaves, no apple trees, but thorns. Iron winter has a grip, the day he goes to Henry to ask for mercy.
‘Is this about Robert Barnes?’ Henry says. ‘It appears I was much deceived in him. Gardiner says he is a rank heretic. And to think I entrusted him with England’s business abroad! You are close enough to the man, you were derelict in not knowing his opinions and laying them bare. I suppose you did not know them?’
‘I am not here to speak for Barnes.’ In his mind he goes out of the room and comes in again. ‘I am here about Gertrude Courtenay, sir. We might release her. Keep the evidence on file. Her fault is credulity, which women cannot help; and loyalty to those passed away, a thing your Majesty understands.’
‘Katherine is never truly dead, is she?’ Henry sounds exhausted. ‘And there are some who will never accept she was not my wife.’
‘Lady Exeter will need means to live, so if your mercy further permits, I will arrange an annuity out of her husband’s lands.’
‘God curse him,’ Henry says. ‘Very well, release the woman, keep Exeter’s child in ward; I want no traitor whelp running free through the realm.’
He makes a note. Henry says, ‘Cromwell, could you have a child?’
He is startled. ‘I think you could,’ Henry says. ‘You are of common stock. Common men have vigour.’
The king does not know they wear out. At forty a labourer is broken and gnarled. His wife is worn to the bone at thirty-five.
‘I thought I would get another son from this marriage,’ the king says, ‘but there is no sign God intends it.’ He sinks into his chair, turns over a few leaves of paper. ‘We might write to Cleves this moment. You could write at my dictation, as we used to.’
He says, ‘My eyes are not what they were.’
So much for common stock. ‘But you still write letters,’ Henry says, ‘I am familiar with your hand. I want you to ask Wilhelm himself where those papers are, that show if his sister was married, because—’ He leans his elbows on the table, his head in his hands. ‘Cromwell, can we not pay her off?’
‘We could offer her a settlement, yes. I do not know how much we would have to find to placate her brother. And I do not know how to salvage your Majesty’s reputation, if you renounce a lawful match. It would be hard to hold up your head before your fellow princes. Or come by another wife.’
‘I could come by one tomorrow,’ Henry says harshly.
The door opens, cautiously. It is the boys with lights. ‘Bring candles here,’ he says. But the king seems to have forgotten the letter. Henry waits till they are alone again, but even then he does not speak; till the warm light diffuses through the room and he says, ‘You remember, my lord, the day we rode down to the Weald? To see the ironmasters, and find out new ways of casting cannon?’
An icy vapour breathes on the windowpanes. Henry’s diamonds, as he moves, look like steel beads, or those seeds that fall on stony ground. He waits, the quill beneath his fingertips. ‘Those were brighter days,’ the king says. ‘Jane could not travel, being great with my heir. She did not like me to leave her, but she knew we had long planned the excursion, and your lordship’s press of business being what it is, and the duties of a king being what they are, she would not ask me to forbear. I remember rising early and, it being about St John’s Day, it was light before the permitted hour for Mass; Jane said, will you tarry till your chaplain comes? And I tarried, because the fears of a woman in that condition, they must be heeded. It will be only two nights or three, I said, though we shall take it at an easy pace. We shall listen to the birdsong and ride, like knights of Camelot, through the woods. We shall enjoy the sunshine.’ Henry pauses: ‘The sunshine, where did that go?’
‘God made February, sir, as well as June.’
‘Spoken like a bishop.’ Henry looks up. ‘I want you and Gardiner to be reconciled.’
We tried that, he thinks.
‘At Easter, sit down together.’
‘On my honour, I will attempt it.’
Silence. He thinks, perhaps what I said was not good enough? ‘I will make peace if I can.’
The boys have not closed the shutters. He rises to do it. Henry says, ‘Leave those, I want what light there is.’ Beyond the glass gulls swing by, as if they have mistaken the towers of Westminster for a sea cliff.
Henry is watching him. His vast hands have fallen onto his gown, limp and empty. He says, ‘But when I think about it, Cromwell … I recall we never made that journey.’
‘Into Kent? No, but it was projected—’
‘Projected, yes. But always some reason we could not go.’
He sits down again, facing the king. ‘Let us say we did, sir. It is no harm to imagine it.’ England’s green heart: distant church bells, the shade of the trees from the heat. ‘Let us say the ironmasters gave us their best welcome, and opened their minds to us, and showed us all their secrets.’
‘They must,’ Henry says. ‘No one could keep secrets from me. It is no use to try.’
He goes out: one hand against the wall, he utters a prayer. The Book Called Henry has no advice for him.
The king has moved from his native ground: as if he has entered another realm where cause does not link to effect; nor does he care how he opens his heart. Think of the days when the Boleyns came down. The king had written a play, about Boleyn’s monstrous adulteries. He kept it in a little book in his bosom, and tried to show it to people.
In January he said, Cromwell, you are not to blame. Now you can hear him thinking: one thing, one thing I wanted him to do for me, and he would not.
He thinks, it would be hard to free him but not impossible. It would be a victory to Norfolk and his ilk, it would be encouragement to the papists and an end to the new Europe. How often do you get the chance to reconfigure the map? Perhaps once in two or three generations: and now the chance is slipping away. Wyatt and the operation of time will break France and the Emperor apart, and we will be back to the old, worn-out games that have lasted my lifetime.
Then Harry will want a new wife, and God knows who. A song drifts into his head, it must be one Walter sang:
I kissed her sweet, and she kissed me;
I danced the darling on my knee.
Next he will choose some papist, and I will wish I were far away. If I had stayed in Italy I could have had a house in the hills, with white walls and a red-tiled roof. A colonnade shading its entrance, shuttered balconies against the heat; orchards, flowery walks, fountains and a vineyard; a library with frescoes depicting animals and birds, like the paintings in the chapter house at the abbey.
At the Frescobaldi villa the girl came every morning with her basket of herbs. You struck the jars of oil as you passed, and the note told you how full they were. After the kitchen boys stopped picking fights with him, he taught them English catches and rhymes. Under blue Italian skies, they sang of misty mornings, of ash and oak, of sudden loss of maidenheads in the month of May.
Then one day the master whistled him to the counting house, and he left his apron on the peg. After that, among the Frescobaldis he became a confidential aide. Visiting the Portinari family, he was a friend of the young men of the house. No one said, here’s the blacksmith’s boy, don’t let him in. When he left the Frescobaldi bank he went to Venice. There at his workplace they had a long chest with carved panels, showing St Sebastian stuck with arrows. Every night he used to pack the ledgers away, dropping the key into his pocket; he had never given the martyr a glance. So how is it he can see him now? There are longbowmen on one side. Crossbowmen on the other. He is pierced from every angle.
He walks away from the king’s rooms. I kissed her sweet, and she kissed me …
In the next days he finds his benevolence is tested and his patience is running short. When a spy is taken and proves resistant, he does not go along to the Tower to bribe or cajole or trick him; he values speed. Rack him, he says: and appoints three men to take down the result. Come to me first thing in the morning, he says, and tell me of your success.
Before Norfolk arrives home from France, he has invaded the duke’s own country. He has closed Thetford Priory, where the duke’s forebears lie. They have been witnessing miracles at Thetford for three hundred years, ever since they turned up a cache of relics, neatly labelled, that included rocks from Mount Calvary, part of Our Lady’s sepulchre, and fragments of the manger in which the child Jesus was laid. Now comes the greatest miracle of all, Thomas Cromwell, the Putney boy: who holds that the passage of time does not add lustre to fakes, and that there is no need to reverence a lie because of its antiquity.
What is to happen to the honoured dead? John Howard is buried here, shot out of his saddle at Bosworth and dead before he hit the ground. So is the duke’s father, that same Thomas Howard who pulped the Scots at Flodden, and spread their broken limbs over the fields. And this is where, more recently, young Richmond was deposited, the king’s bastard and the duke’s son-in-law.
Will the family have to build new tombs? It is an insult to the Howard name, Norfolk shouts, and a crippling expense as well. He comes to him with a question: ‘Cromwell, do you hold me in contempt? Mind yourself. I shall have your guts.’
‘Fighting talk,’ he says. ‘We haven’t had such talk since the cardinal’s day.’
‘My father must be prayed for,’ the duke roars. ‘If not at Thetford, then somewhere else.’
Riche says, ‘What, you mean at Lord Cromwell’s expense?’
He thinks, why don’t you just give up on him, your old dad? Let him take his chances?
‘“Flodden Norfolk”, they called him,’ the duke says. ‘A father named after a battle. How do you like that, Cromwell?’
Howard takes himself off, cursing. He has been cursing since he returned from France; once there, he had been advised to cultivate François’s mistress, as the way to the king’s confidence, and he is still peppered with shame at having to beg favour from a woman.
Wriothesley says, ‘He takes such pride in his ancestors, I do not think he will forgive you for turning them out. And I do not think he has disclosed all the dealings he had with the French, not by a long way.’
Richard Riche says, ‘The French hate you. And Norfolk encourages them.’
Wriothesley says, ‘Did I not advise you, sir, when the Boleyns came down? Break Norfolk, I said, while you have the chance.’
Robert Barnes comes to Austin Friars: once again the drowned man, washed up his stairs. If he had known Barnes was coming, he would have had them stop him at the gate.
Barnes says, ‘Winchester thinks, if he pulls me down, you go down with me.’
He nods: that seems a fair summary. ‘You could run,’ he suggests.
‘Not this time,’ Barnes says. ‘I am too tired. You always say, prudence. Circumspection. How long must God wait, for England to embrace true religion?’
‘Another decade,’ he says. ‘Not long, by His standards.’
Barnes stares at him. ‘You mean till Henry is dead? But what if the prince never reigns? What if Mary comes in?’
‘Then we’re all dead,’ he says.
On 12 March, the Earl of Essex, Henry Bouchier, falls from his horse, breaks his neck, and dies on the spot. ‘God forgive me,’ Charles Brandon says. ‘On the king’s wedding day I made a jest about him, that he was not long for this world.’
‘My lord,’ he says, ‘it is nowise your doing.’
Where will old Essex go? Straight to Judgement? Or will he lie quiet in his grave till the Last Day? Will he work off his sins in Purgatory for half a million years, or is he already at his destination—at the top of the Stairway to Heaven, or in a pit of the Inferno reserved for earls?
The most part of the court does not care. Except on Sundays or if they are taken sick, they do not give a fig for the disputes of Gardiner or Barnes. They only want to know what will happen to Essex’s title. The earl had no heir. His son-in-law expects to get the nod, but no one knows where to lay their bets.
Palm Sunday, news comes of the death of John de Vere, fifteenth Earl of Oxford. This death is not a shock; Vere has been unwell for months. His heir is of full age and will succeed as sixteenth earl; and it is assumed he will also be appointed to his father’s office of Lord Great Chamberlain, the head of the king’s household.
‘Not necessarily,’ Mr Wriothesley says. His family being heralds, he has these matters at his fingertips. ‘Vere was named to that office in the year 1133, in the reign of the first Henry. And there have been very few chamberlains since who were not of that blood. But it is not theirs of right. The king can appoint whom he pleases.’
He has no time to discuss it. There is a new ambassador he must receive. Cleves has sent us a resident at last. His name is Dr Carl Harst and he has previously represented Duke Wilhelm in Spain. He has no English, and no documents: also no lodging, a meagre allowance and very little style about his clothes or his person. He says to Wriothesley, ‘I wish they had sent a better sort of man—I am afraid the court will laugh at him.’
‘At his expectations,’ Wriothesley says, ‘certainly—for they are all wrong.’
By now, Duke Wilhelm will have had a letter from his sister. Writing herself in her native tongue, Anna has told her brother she could wish for no better husband: she thanks her family for promoting her happiness.
Lady Rochford has spoken to him. ‘She does not know what to do. She pretends all is well but she is like a jackdaw waiting for figs to ripen, living on hope.’ Rochford laughs. ‘Lent is over, and no man however pious can refuse his wife. We say to her, “Madam, what does he do? Once the candle is out?” She says, he kisses me and says, “Good night, darling.” Then in the morning, he rises and says, “Farewell, sweetheart.” We said to her, madam, if this is all that occurs, it will be a long time before we have a Duke of York.’
‘Hush, Jane,’ he says.
‘Everybody is talking. How long do you suppose you can keep it from the Germans?’
Footsteps behind them: one of the maids. ‘You seem to be everywhere, Mistress Howard.’
Katherine gazes up at him. ‘Yes.’
He prices her up. ‘New dress?’
‘Uncle Norfolk.’
‘Do you bear a message, or have you come here to dazzle my senses?’
She dips her head. ‘The queen and Lady Mary will walk in the gallery with you. My lord.’
Outside the rain runs down the windows: lead men on rooftops spout it from their maws.
The ladies of Anna’s privy chamber have already told him that her meeting with the Lady Mary has not been a success. Against all the evidence, Mary takes Anna to be a Lutheran; while Anna has been made wary by her own people, who have long assumed Mary spies for the Emperor.
In the gallery he walks with a lady on either hand: Anna spring-like in yellow, Mary in her favoured crimson. ‘Rain again,’ Anna says, showing off her English.
‘I fear so,’ he says.
Henry has said to him, talk to her, Cromwell: can’t you talk to her? I dare not, he said, and Henry said, why not, if I give you leave? He had thought, because I do not know what you want me to fetch away from the conversation. Do you want her to turn herself into a woman you can love, or a woman you can repudiate?
Mary says, ‘I understand your friend Dr Barnes will soon be in ward. And other preacher friends of yours.’
She leaves a pause for him to say, Barnes is not my friend. He does not fill it. Anna walks beside him, blithe, unheeding, her fingertips on his coat. He feels as if the Lutheran clock is still in his palm, the fidget of its workings disturbing his pulse. Its case was made by an artist; its machinery, by a gunsmith.
‘What does Barnes expect?’ Mary says. ‘First he says he recants. Then he repeats his errors. Were you there?’
‘Yes, Madam. Days and days of sermons.’
‘Let me have notes on them,’ she says. As if he were her clerk. He bows. She says, ‘I believe all is awry in Calais.’
‘Lord Lisle is expected here for the Garter feast. No doubt some reckoning will be made.’
‘Strange times, my lord. Two great lords dead.’
The gallery is hung with the king’s new tapestries, depicting the life of St Paul. A queen, a king’s daughter and a brewer’s son, they have walked the road to Damascus, blinded by the light; they have sailed the Middle Sea. Now they pause before the Sorcerers of Ephesus who, converted by the saint, are burning their books. He feels he would like to reach into the weave and pull them out of the fire.
At Gardiner’s house they have capons with figs, Crustade Lombarde and chopped chicken livers with hard-boiled eggs; they have spiced wine custards and jellied veal. He, Cromwell, is there at the king’s command, and he looks at his dinner because he does not want to look at the Bishop of Winchester. He does not want to look at Thomas Howard either. He did not even know he was going to be there, until he saw his barge moored.
Coming in, he says, ‘Why are you here, my lord duke? I thought there was plague in your household. You should not be near the king.’
‘I’m not,’ Norfolk says. ‘I’m near you.’
Gardiner seems inclined to emollience, like a good host. ‘I understand a servant died, but my lord had not been within fourteen miles of him.’
‘He didn’t die, and it wasn’t the plague,’ Norfolk says. ‘Nobody else in the house took sick. Nothing ails me, I assure you. At this time of year I eat a tansy pudding to purify my blood.’
‘You are always very tender of your person,’ he says. ‘You too, my lord bishop.’ They sit down. Wine is poured. He turns to Norfolk. ‘I remember when Stephen was secretary to my lord cardinal, and we both went to Ipswich, to prepare for the opening of my lord’s college. I put up the hangings myself because they were so slow, and I carried in benches and trestles—and this good companion of mine, he stood by and directed me, and advised me out of his charity not to strain my back.’
Gardiner says, smiling, ‘I only exert myself in a good cause.’
Norfolk bangs his goblet on the board. ‘Ipswich?’ Never was the word spat out, as the duke spits it. ‘To get funds for his wretched school at Ipswich, Wolsey pulled down the priory at Felixstowe—and that was my priory. I rejoiced when his college was closed. I hope it falls in ruins. By God, how is it this realm is so unjust? If it is not Wolsey cheating me, it is his worshipper here. Wolsey was your God, Cromwell. Your butcher God.’
‘I must agree.’ Gardiner puts down his knife. ‘It amazes me, Cromwell, that you still do not see Wolsey for what he was. He was corrupt and he was grandiose. You know yourself that when he lost the king’s favour he wrote to foreign princes, asking their aid. Without the king’s knowledge, over the king’s head, he set up his dealings as if he were a prince himself. What do we call such a man? We call him a traitor. If someone had given you the brief, you yourself would have convicted him.’
‘Aye,’ Norfolk says. ‘You would not have broken sweat. Still, I suppose it is something, that a man like you feels gratitude. What had you, when you came to court? Wolsey owned the shirt on your back. Now stir yourself, and show your gratitude to the king, who has done so much more for you. Take your Germans and kick them out of doors.’
A boy approaches with a jug. Stephen frowns at him: the boy drops back to the wall. It is not like Thomas Howard to be the worse for drink, but he must have had a skinful before he left his house. It is to give him courage, he thinks: and by God he will need it.
He bunches his fist. He bangs it on the table. The dishes leap. ‘The whole council approved the match. You signed, Thomas Howard, as I did. As for the lady, the king could not get her here fast enough.’
‘No, by the saints,’ Norfolk says, ‘it is you who burdened and chained him. And I tell you, he wants to be free. Have you not seen him looking at my niece? He cast a fantasy to Katherine the first time ever he did see her.’
‘If you want power,’ he says, ‘get it like a man. It does not become your grey hairs, to play Pandar.’
‘God rot you!’ The duke stamps his feet, pushes back his chair, hauls his napkin loose from his person. Gardiner has opulent linen and it looks as if he is fighting his way out of a tent. ‘I’ll not sit here to be called a bawd!’
As the duke stands up, he stands up too. The servants flatten themselves against the wall. There is a red blink in the corner of his eye. There is the knife at his heart: cold under his coat, ready in its sheath, and his hand moves to it, as if it acts by its own will.
But Gardiner steps between them. ‘No fists today, my lords.’
Fists? he thinks. You don’t know me. I could carve him like a goose, before you were out of your seat.
Smiling as if it were a ladies’ bowling match, Gardiner flings his hands in the air. ‘Well, my lord Norfolk, if you must leave us, you are a busy man.’ He smiles. ‘We will give your dinner to the poor.’
When the duke has made his noisy exit, shouting for his guard and his bargemen, they sit down again, and Stephen reaches across the table and pats his arm.
‘Say it, Stephen.’ He is glum. ‘“Cromwell, you forget yourself, we’re not in Putney now.”’
Stephen signals for the wine jug. ‘Insult is a fine art. I wondered for a moment if he knew who Pandar was. I thought you might have been too subtle.’
‘No, not today,’ he says. ‘I’m not feeling subtle at all. Forgive me. I see we must make efforts towards each other, and I can do better, and will. I am sure I have things you want, where I could oblige you, and there are things I want—’
‘You want Barnes let out,’ Gardiner says. ‘Is he reformable, do you think? I am always sorry to see a Cambridge man go into the fire. I spoke for him, you remember, years back, when he came before Wolsey.’
‘If you say so.’
‘Otherwise he would have gone straight to the Tower. Which would have saved time, I suppose. I see no good he has brought to England, for all his traffic as ambassador. The king repents him that Barnes was ever employed.’
They bring in pickled greens, and pears in an aromatic syrup, and quince marmalade. Stephen says, ‘Norfolk is precipitate, but he is right. Don’t you feel the wind changing? You told the king that without the Germans he was destitute of friends. And that was true. But once the alliance melts away, Henry will be courted again, by France and Emperor both.’
‘I do not understand how Norfolk thinks he can see the future. When usually he cannot see the end of his nose.’
‘You forget, it is only weeks since he was in France himself. I believe that François made overtures of friendship that were—I will not say hidden—but they were private. Entrusted to the duke, but not to you.’
So, he says.
‘I know you have people of yours in every man’s service, at home and abroad. I know they are spying and prying and copying and purloining from chests and thieving keys. I have suffered from them in my own house.’
‘As I have suffered, Stephen. From your men.’
‘But you are not omniscient. Nor are you omnipresent. Have you been thinking you were? Did you think you were God?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘God’s spy.’
‘Then spy out the facts,’ Stephen says. ‘If the king believes he does not need the friendship of Cleves, then considering his intractable dislike of the lady, there is only one course, which is to work out how to free him.’
He pushes his glass away. Like Norfolk, but less hastily, he extracts himself from the table linen. Gardiner is no fool. A demon, but no fool. ‘Good marmalade,’ he says. ‘I think it is Lady Lisle’s recipe? The king often praises it.’
‘She sends it to us all,’ Gardiner says, as if excusing himself.
‘To all those she wishes to please. Does she wrap letters around it?’
Gardiner looks at him with appreciation. ‘By God, nothing gets by you, does it? Not even the preserves.’ He sighs. ‘Thomas, we both know what it is to serve this king. We know it is impossible. The question is, who can best endure impossibility? You have never lost his favour. I have lost it many times. And yet—’
‘And yet here you are. Looking to be back on the council.’
Stephen ushers him out: the open air. ‘You know what the king wants. That we should sink our differences in service to him. That we should declare ourselves entire perfect friends.’
They touch palms, coldly. As he runs down the steps to the wharf, Stephen calls, ‘Cromwell? Mind your back.’
It is a raw day of splintering sunlight, the first sign of the season changing. His barge takes him back across the river. On his flag, little black birds flutter: the cardinal’s choughs, dancing about their pole.
His bargemaster says, ‘We saw the duke’s barge, and we said, by the Mass, pity my lord—Norfolk and Gardiner, both?’
He says, ‘I feel to my master the king as I do to Christ, hanging between two thieves.’
He takes off his glove, slides a hand inside his garments. When his hand appears again, his knife is in it. ‘Christophe?’ he says. ‘This is yours now. Try not to use it.’
Christophe turns the knife over in his hands. ‘I shall stand taller for owning it. Why do you part with it now?’
‘Because I almost stuck it in Norfolk.’ From his crew, a subdued cheer. ‘You can tell Mr Sadler I have surrendered it.’ Rafe wanted me to grow up, he thinks, before I grow old.
Bastings asks, ‘Did you make it yourself, sir? When you did that sort of work?’
‘No. That one I made … I lost it. This was given me by a young lady in Rome. I have had it for some years.’
‘And put it to some use, I warrant,’ Bastings says admiringly. ‘Sir, a thing you should know. That little lass of the duke’s, I hear she is spoiled. There is one in the old duchess’s household boasts he has had his fingers in her cunt. He says he has felt it in the dark and he would know it among a hundred.’
‘Where did you hear that, from the watermen?’ He wraps his cloak around himself. Even if it is true, he thinks, what can I do with it? If the king is in love he will trample anyone who gets between him and his sport. He says, ‘Bastings—consort with men with cleaner minds.’
I shall forget I ever heard it, he thinks. He is rowed across the Thames, furiously forgetting it. One among a hundred?
I kissed her sweet, and she kissed me;
I danced the darling on my knee.
My fancy fairly on her I set:
So merrily singeth the nightingale.
Mr Wriothesley is waiting for him. He tells him, ‘You can write to the ambassadors that Winchester and I have dined. That we now understand each other perfectly.’
Wriothesley says, ‘Shall I add some such phrase as “all past displeasures be now forgot”?’
‘At your discretion, Mr Wriothesley.’
Sometimes it seems to him we have not made any advance since Epiphany. The Romans and Britons are still fighting through his dreams. They advance, retreat, press forward again. They slash, they stab, they feint, they duck; they raise their armoured limbs slowly and chop, chop, chop.
In Calais, a new commission is sitting to find out heretics. Norfolk started it, when he passed through: setting a fire there, then stepping on a boat and sailing away. He says to the king, ‘Why don’t we find out traitors instead? Forty Frenchmen under arms could take Calais in an hour. The rot is within, and I do not mean the townsfolk, I mean those who have charge of all.’
The king says, pained, ‘Lord Lisle is very dear to me.’
‘I won’t trouble Lord Lisle,’ he says. Not yet: I will start with his friends. ‘I want certain papers. Wyatt has told me what to look for. He knows all about Calais.’
‘Oh, Wyatt,’ the king says. ‘What he says he does not mean, and what he means he does not say.’
It is Bishop Sampson who is his immediate target. Putting him under house arrest, he impounds his papers and scours them for any hint of dealings with Pole; any hints that others, among his friends, might have dealt with Pole. When the king says, well, Cromwell, what proof, he says, sir, it is intricate work. It is like putting together one of the pavements at the abbey. You have triangles and circles, rectangles and squares. You have limestone and porphyry, serpentine and glass. You must work with the eye of faith: the onlookers will not see the pattern, till suddenly they do.
Now the season changes. Each brightening day is made up of other days he has known. He sees a flock of chaffinches rise like flying roses from a still pool. His hawks watch dust motes as they flitter against a wall, as if the sunlight is a living thing, their prey.
Henry calls him in. ‘I must put a matter to you. It is a matter of some gravity. Come with me here into my closet and close the door.’
A window is open. Someone is singing outside. He thinks, is this where all my broken nights have led me, my unquiet dreams?
In slumbers oft for fear I quake.
For heat and cold I burn and shake.
For lack of sleep my head doth ache
What means this?
He follows the king. What can you do but, as Cicero says, live hopefully, die bravely?
He goes home to a disturbed household. Call-Me meets him, a document in his hand. ‘Sir, you had better see this at once.’
It is a transcript—a copy, let’s be blunt—of a letter from Ambassador Marillac to François. ‘Marillac says the king is about to arrest Cranmer. He is to go to the Tower, with Barnes.’
Call-Me has put a man in the ambassador’s train. ‘Well done for this,’ he says. The paper feels hot.
‘There is worse, sir. Marillac says the king means to take the Privy Seal from us and give it to Fitzwilliam. And that he will cast you down from your office as Vicegerent, and raise up Bishop Tunstall.’
He says, ‘I have just been with the king. I know he is swift to reverse his policies, but he has not had time to do this in half an hour. I have come straight from him and I bring news. It is good news for you, and I hope you will think so.’
He is about to say, go and get Rafe, but Rafe is already coming in, his eyes on Marillac’s letter. ‘Can I see the text, sir? Call-Me will not part with it.’
‘Ignore it,’ he says. ‘The ambassador sits in his lodgings concocting these fantastical tales—they only need Sexton in an ass’s head and Will Somer as a Spanish harlot.’
Rafe and Call-Me look at each other. Rafe says, ‘The original letter will be on the Dover road by now. Do you want the rider to have an accident?’
‘He could lose his missive in a puddle,’ Wriothesley suggests.
The suggestion is so mild it makes him laugh. ‘Let it go,’ he says. ‘If France gets his hopes up, so much the sweeter. He would like to see me dismissed, and the king served by boys and fools.’
‘Which are we?’ Wriothesley says.
‘Neither, you are the chosen ones. Be quiet and hear my news, you will be better for it. You know ever since I have been Master Secretary I have tried to be with the king’s person—but I am always wanted at Westminster—so you know what my life has been.’
Those days that roll from dawn to dawn. For lack of sleep my head doth ache … ‘With the king’s permission, I am going to divide my duties. I have broached it with him before, but the time is now.’
Mr Wriothesley offers to interrupt, but he continues. ‘You will divide the task. Each of you will be Master Secretary. You will split your time so that one of you is in Westminster, the other with the king. I will make machinery, so that your work passes perfectly from hand to hand.’
‘A prodigy of nature,’ Rafe says. He is astonished. ‘Two bodies with one head.’
‘One awake and one asleep,’ Wriothesley says.
‘You will both be knights. You will both be raised to the council. When Parliament meets, you will sit in the Commons, and I in the Lords.’ He slaps his hands on their shoulders. ‘You know what I have made this office, by God’s grace and the king’s. Nothing eludes it. Nothing lies beyond it. Everything starts with you. And with you, everything stops.’
He sits down. ‘Now, also—’
‘There is more?’
He holds up a hand. Sudden pleasure afflicts like sudden pain, and leaves you dizzy, numb. At such times in your life, if ever you see such times—if fortune favours you, as fortune favours the brave—you lose for a moment a sense of the firm boundaries of yourself, and become light as air. ‘I am to have Oxford’s post, Chief of the Household, Lord Great Chamberlain. His son keeps his peerage, as is natural, but as poor Essex had no heir direct, I am to have his title.’
He had thought the sands of time were running out: running through the cracks in the shining bowl of possibility he holds in his hands. ‘Now all is mended,’ he says.
Call-Me flushes. ‘I congratulate you, sir, from the bottom of my heart.’
He says, ‘The king explained to me how I was an aspect of his glory. He said, “It is not given to every ruler to look past a man’s provenance to his capacities. God gave you talents, Cromwell. And he caused you to be born at such a time and place that you could use them in my service.”’
‘And you kept your countenance?’ Rafe says.
‘I did, so please keep yours. He is right to congratulate himself. He thinks of the laws passed and the money made. If I were a prince and I had Cromwell, I would think myself Heaven’s elect.’
‘I wonder why now,’ Call-Me says. ‘In justice he might have done it long ago. But he knows it will give much offence.’
‘Not as much offence, as it gives delight,’ Rafe says. ‘Tell the household. Send to Mr Richard. Get Gregory. By God! Will Gregory be called Lord Gregory now? Will he have the title?’
Below, a roar goes up. Thomas Avery shoots in, embraces him. ‘Sir, they will all expect some increase in their wages.’
‘That is fitting, as they will be serving an earl.’
The room fills up with his people, faces shining. He draws Avery aside. ‘You remember what I told you? About my money abroad?’
Avery is surprised. ‘I do, sir.’
‘So you know what to do?’
The boy frowns. ‘Forgive me, but your lordship is talking as if your fortunes were reversed. As if you had suffered a blow of fate, instead of great promotion and honour.’
‘Find my daughter,’ he says. ‘Open a channel to her, so she can have funds.’
She can use my money, he thinks, though not my love.
‘When I left the king—’ he says. He breaks off. Truth is, he had stood on the threshold and thought, those I want to tell are dead. I want to tell my good master Frescobaldi, and my friends in his kitchen. I want to tell the boy who, as I walked upstairs to the counting house, was scrubbing the stairs. I want to tell Anselma, and my wife and children, and the girl in Rome who gave me my knife. I want to sing Scaramella: Scaramella to the war is gone, bomboretta, bomboro. I want to tell Wolsey, and get his blessing. I want to tell Walter, and see his face. News will travel to Putney: Put-an-edge-on-it has been made an earl! He wants to tell the eel boy; he wishes he were alive, so he could go down there, dig him out of his drinking den, and pound it into his skull.
At Austin Friars, the watchdogs get an extra bone. The leopard an extra carcass. Anthony the jester goes about the house, his face solemn, ringing his silver bells.
On a fine spring day, his new style is proclaimed. The new secretaries are at work. Sir Call-Me Wriothesley reads the patents of creation that make him an earl. Sir Rafe Sadler proclaims him Lord Chamberlain.
When Marillac next comes to court, the ambassador sees him, starts, and goes the other way. He feels some sympathy: the ambassador tells his king what he wants to hear, and though he is across the sea he must guess at the irritable requirements of a sick man. They say François cannot ride half a mile these days. They say he is dying. But he has died so many times, in popular report. Like our king, he rises again.
Henry says, ‘Ambassador Marillac declares he can no longer transact business with Cremuel present. He believes you are a spy for the Emperor.’
‘That puts us in a difficulty,’ he says.
‘Not necessarily. I can see him alone.’
He bows. It has always been the king’s belief that prince speaks to prince, and common men crouch just within earshot, ready to scurry at command. Henry says, ‘We must mollify François. If he lives, he may make a new treaty with me. And the Emperor, too, I see we must begin to conciliate him.’
He hears the message. Work both sides of the bank, Cromwell. As we always have.
Sometimes, he says to Wriothesley, the best thing you can do is to pick up your papers and get yourself out.
From the French court, no reaction to his promotion: or none polite enough for the record. From the Imperial court, an equal silence. But congratulations from Eustache Chapuys, who waits in Flanders for Charles to send him back as ambassador: which he will do, Chapuys says, as soon as the rift with England is mended.
A rumour has taken hold in the city that Anna will be crowned at Whit. He does not counter it. It will spread abroad, and tend to calm. Dr Harst visits the queen, but what he draws from her is a mystery. Harst is useless, always pestering him with incomprehensible requests about protocol. He, the Earl of Essex, is busy, because Parliament will open and he has packed the schedule with legislation. The king expects him to raise taxes. The money from abbey lands is slow to come in; as he once had to explain to the cardinal, it is delicate work, to turn real property into hard cash.
He speaks in the Lords, not about taxes, but about God: setting forth the king’s intent, which is harmony. He feels he has never spoken so well, nor said so little.
After the first session, Master Secretary Rafe comes to him: ‘Richard Riche is not content. He thinks, with so many changes, he should have been promoted.’
To what? What better thing could a man be, than Master of Augmentations? Riche has his estate in Essex. He has received Bartholomew, one of the greatest of London priories. But Rafe says, ‘He has conceived a grudge, sir. Because you do not love him as you love Thomas Wyatt.’
‘Wyatt will soon be home,’ he says. It is perverse of Riche to raise a comparison. ‘It just shows…’ he says to Rafe; but he lets his sentence trail. It shows how unaccountable men are, what they harbour in their souls: which by no means shows on their faces.
Rafe says, ‘You remember your neighbour Stow? When he came with a complaint, saying you had stolen part of his garden?’
‘There was no trespass. Stow had his fence in the wrong place.’
‘We know that at Austin Friars. You said, I know where my boundaries are. But Stow went through the town bad-mouthing you. His family complains and everybody believes them.’
He reads the lesson that Rafe intends. He has stolen nothing from the Earl of Oxford’s family. But the Veres think they own the chamberlain’s post by long continuance in it, and they intended to hold it while the world endures.
When he meets Gardiner, the bishop says, ‘My congratulations, Cromwell.’
‘Essex,’ he says. ‘I am Thomas Essex now.’
‘You confounded the French,’ Gardiner says. ‘They were sure the Cleves debacle had finished you. And if not Cleves, then the heretics in Calais, claiming you for their own. Do you know there was a soothsayer called Calchas, who survived his predicted hour of death, and died of laughing?’
‘But then there was the poet Petrarch. He lay as one dead for the best part of a day. His people were praying for his soul. But just before the burial party was due, he sat up—and then he lived another thirty years. Thirty years, Stephen.’
Parliament assembles and the court is filling up, the biggest court in years. He sees Jane Rochford in conversation with Norfolk. They look earnest; her kinsman is showing her some deference, by God.
He traps her later, his tone teasing. ‘What was Uncle Norfolk telling you?’
‘Things convenient for me to know.’
She swings away from him, haughty, angry: useless. He thinks, I’ve lost her. When did that happen?
His son’s wife comes to him; ‘I bring news of needlework. I know your lordship is interested.’
He tilts his head: I’m listening.
‘I was bidden to do a piece of work. One of the maids could have done it, but it was handed to me out of malice. It was something of Jane’s. Jane the queen, my sister, it was her girdle book, her little prayers. I was told, take this and pick the initials out. I said, I will not do it. I am Mistress Cromwell, not some servant.’
‘Lady Cromwell,’ he reminds her.
‘I should have said so, should I not? I forgot. My title is too new.’
She is on the brink of angry tears, and he would like to put his arms around her, but better not. Bess should not be stitching, unstitching; she could run a field camp, or direct a siege.
‘The next thing I see, Katherine Howard is wearing it at her waist. It is not the first gift she has had, that belonged to some lady better than she will ever be. The king wants to have her in his bed, to maul her about and see if he can do aught. And her people will say to her, do not gratify him, do not give way, do not so much as glance in his direction. I know.’ Her face is set. ‘We Seymours did it ourselves. We cannot complain—though we do. The Howards believe he might marry her. And who is to say he will not?’
He feels weary. ‘What does Anna say? She must know.’ He has seen her demeanour: sullen, listless. ‘She should give the king no cause to complain. If I were to advise her—’
‘But you do not. You don’t go near her.’
If he were to counsel Anna, it would be to patience. The dowager Katherine won the admiration of all, when she sat smiling by the king she supposed her husband, through hours of court ceremonies, hours which stretched into years. Never was she seen with tears on her cheeks, or an angry frown.
‘Yes,’ Bess says, ‘Katherine was a great pattern for womanhood. She died alone and friendless, did she not?’
On May Day, Richard Cromwell is to fight in the tournament at Greenwich, scheduled to fill five days with combat, spectacle and public rejoicing. He rides for the challengers, called the Gentlemen of England: among his team-mates, the gallant and handsome Thomas Seymour, and among his foes, the young Earl of Surrey, making his public debut in the lists.
Gregory no doubt will fight next year. For now he is a practice opponent. He has not Richard’s weight, but he has style and no fear, the best armour, the best horseflesh.
‘Tom Culpeper,’ Gregory explains. ‘We are studying what he will do. He is the king’s favourite, he has money laid on him. Richard is drawn against him in the foot combat. He does not come against him in the joust.’
The foot combat is the most ruthless of all the tournament games. It is ad hominem. There is no place to hide.
‘A likely young man,’ he says. ‘He is handsome.’
‘Not when I’ve finished with him,’ Richard says.
Both Suffolk and Norfolk are present when the contests open, and they greet each other with their usual empty civility. Suffolk would rise from the dead, he declares, to be at such an occasion, because in his day he held the palm: myself and the king, he says, always Harry and me. Gods, we were, in our time.
If you sit close to the king, under the canopy with the arms of England and France, you feel his body rigid with tension, his muscles jumping as if he were himself in the saddle. Henry sees, notes, scores every move, and at the end of a bout he drops back in his chair, releasing his breath as the winner and loser are led away, their lathered horses sidestepping and curvetting, their helmets off to acknowledge the crowd.
Young Surrey rides seven times: he has no special success, but he is not unhorsed either. Norfolk, he suspects, prefers proper fighting. The Howard entourage make a good deal of noise, but provided a show is made, and the family honour is upheld, the duke seems little interested in the finer points. He is not one to pine for old times, when it comes to a contest of arms; given his choice, he would haul up a cannon, and blast the foe to Jerusalem.
Between the contests musicians play. They sing ‘England Be Glad’, their voices lost in the open air. Then they play the Bear Dance, and Montard Brawle, which makes the ladies jump in their seats and beat time, and all those who are not in armour clap their hands. The queen is sedate, her hands folded, but she watches all that passes with a wide and interested gaze; she looks to the king for a signal for when to applaud and when to despond.
He, Essex, goes in and out, as messengers call on him. ‘News from Ireland,’ he says briefly to the king. While the silk pennants flutter and the trumpets call, he is crawling through bog and brush, after the O’Connors, the O’Neills, the Kavanaghs and the Breens: the wreckers, burners and despoilers, ready to open their ports to Pole’s ships.
When Richard makes his first run, his lance lifts his opponent clean out of the saddle. It is the cleanest strike seen in years. You have seen a vulgar boy plunge his knife into a loaf, and wave it around on the point? That is how the enemy is hoisted, flying into the air while his horse carries on without him. You hardly hear him hit the ground because the courtiers are yelling like drunks at a bear-baiting.
Richard collects his horse and turns him. His grooms rush to the end of the barrier to make sure he wheels wide of the tilt. Richard shows the crowd his mailed glove, empty, as if they did not know his lance was splintered. Henry is on his feet, a blaze of gold. He is beside himself, laughing and crying. They are waving Richard back to the king, but through the narrow slit in his helmet most probably he cannot see the signal; now a squire takes his bridle, and his mount flecked with lather steps up, snorting, harness ringing. The king takes a diamond from his finger: he is mouthing something; Richard’s mailed arm reaches out.
Next day is Sunday. Richard Cromwell kneels, and rises Sir Richard. Henry kisses him. He says, ‘Richard, you are my diamond.’
On 3 May the challengers and the answerers fight on horseback, with rebated swords. Fitzwilliam, Lord Admiral, sits beside him and talks below the clatter. ‘The word from the border is that the Scots are gathering a fleet. Their ambassador says James plans to sail to France to visit his kin. But our agents say he is bound for Ireland.’
He glances across at Norfolk. ‘A pity the Scot does not come by land. My lord is always looking to fight his father’s battles over again. He is short of glory these days.’
Fitzwilliam says, ‘I want twenty ships. I must be at the Irish coast before James, to chase him back to the open sea.’
He nods. ‘I will see you supplied.’
A great roar rises from the crowd: another knight spilled from his saddle to the green and springy ground, crunching in his weight of mail and tumbling arse-over-pate. The winner removes his helmet: the spectators applaud: Cromwell! they shout. Fitzwilliam says abruptly, ‘You are popular in this arena.’
‘It’s my nephew they are shouting for. I should send Richard to the council in my stead, to explain what I have spent.’
The bills are coming in for the conveyance of the queen by land and sea. Her thirteen trumpeters alone have cost us near a hundred pounds. Just this morning he had a chit for more than a hundred and forty pounds for work on the king’s tomb—which is unfair, considering that Henry is never going to die. He complains, ‘It has cost us two thousand marks to honour the Duke of Bavaria as we waved him goodbye.’
The Lord Admiral says, ‘Surely that would be a sound investment for you? Even if you found it from your own purse.’
He does not ask Fitz to enlarge on what he means. He is thinking about the tomb: one hundred and forty-two pounds, eleven shillings and tenpence. Have you ever seen the Wound Man, in a surgeons’ manual? There is a caltrop beneath his foot, a spear through his calf, and between his ribs an arrow, the shaft snapped. There is a cleaver in his shoulder, a sword in his gut, a dagger through his eye. He is bleeding money. Just as well he has persuaded Parliament into a two-year subsidy for the king. It will not be popular in the country. But there are forts to build, as well as ships to fit. He never believed in the amity between François and the Emperor, but he does believe they would put aside their quarrels for an immediate object: the invasion of England. He says to Fitz, ‘They will come in by Ireland if they can, either one of them. Conciliate them, the king says; but he is a fool if he believes anything they say.’
‘I’ll tell him you said so, shall I?’
Down below, the arms of Cromwell snap in the breeze. For Richard, these are the greatest days of his life. More than his marriage, the birth of his sons, his grants of lands, his commissions under the king; more than his prosperity, his security, are these moments when muscles and bone and the conqueror’s eye are indefeasible; when the heart leaps and the sight dazzles and time seems to stretch on all sides and cushion you like a snowfield, like a feather bed. He thinks of Brother Frisby, tumbled in the snow at Launde, shining like a seraph.
Richard is a hard-headed man. He knows this way of knocking a man over is arcane, expensive, obsolete. But he wants to rise in this world, as Cromwells do. His grandsire was a Tudor archer. His father plied the law. Now he is a knight of the realm. Surrey’s expression, beneath his helm, can only be inferred.
Fitz says, ‘Did you ever don helm and harness, my lord?’
By Christ no, he thinks. We pikemen were too poor for mail. We went in boiled leather which we hardened by prayer. We wore other men’s boots.
Blowing in from the coast, Wyatt does not even sit down before he says, ‘Bonner is Bishop of London? You think that serves you?’
‘He is. I did. I doubt him now.’
Bonner is a plump pink man; he looks foolish, but his brain is as sharp as a sharpened nail. He is back from France, installed in his see, and already it seems he may be an ingrate, or double. He, Essex, is not easy to mislead, but these days men are friends at the gate and foes at the door. ‘I thought he was one of us. Perhaps he’s everybody’s. But still,’ he says, ‘Bonner knows things. About Gardiner, his practices in France.’
‘You should not promote a man because he hates Gardiner. That is no safe way.’ Wyatt walks about. ‘I hear you dined.’
‘I dined. Stephen looked as if he were swallowing tadpoles.’
‘You have had Suffolk here, your people say. Be warned. He will not stand with you if you need a friend.’
‘You and Brandon have been at odds for ten years. And I have forgotten why.’
‘So have I. So has he. It does not mean we can make peace.’
‘Go home to Bess Darrell,’ he says. ‘Go down to Allington and enjoy the summer. Bess has helped me. And I am now able to help you in your turn.’
‘You owe me nothing,’ Wyatt says. ‘The obligation is all the other way. I have been in agony, as to what you would think of me. I obeyed my instructions. Make a breach, you said, tear François and the Emperor apart. I have done it, but I fear I have not helped you.’
‘Their enmities were so old, so ingrained,’ he says, ‘that you should not give yourself all the credit. They only reverted to the pattern they knew. Anyway, you followed your instructions, what else could you do? Be assured, it is no detriment to me.’
‘Except you stand to lose your queen.’
So Wyatt knows everything. The waves of the Narrow Sea rustle like sheets, whispering through Europe the news of Henry’s incapacity. ‘It will be a poor game without her, it’s true.’
Wriothesley comes in. ‘Wyatt? I thought it was you.’ They embrace, comrades-in-arms. ‘You can explain to us what is happening here.’
‘But I have been out of the realm,’ Wyatt says.
‘That does not weigh. In it, out of it, we neither walk on the earth nor swim nor fly, we do not know which element we dwell in. Summer is coming, but the king rains and shines like April. Men change their religion as they change their coats. The council makes a resolution and next minute forgets it. We write letters and the words expunge. We are playing chess in the dark.’
‘On a board made of jelly,’ he says.
‘With chessmen of butter.’
Wyatt says, ‘Your images upheave me.’
‘Then make us better ones, dear heart,’ Wriothesley says.
When they embraced, he saw Call-Me’s eyes over Wyatt’s shoulder. They were like Walter’s eyes, one day when he had burned himself in the forge. He had walked away, silent, to plunge his arm in water: he uttered nothing, neither oath nor self-reproof, but sweat started out on his forehead, and his legs buckled.
This year, business tears him away from the feast. The Lord Deputy of Ireland must be replaced, and the need is urgent. It is four or five years since he backed Leonard Grey for the post: well, there again he was mistaken. There are councillors who say the only way forward is to depopulate the island and resettle it with Englishmen. But, he thinks, the Irish would shrink into the interior, and hide in holes where rats could not live.
He says to Audley, ‘There are rumours that Pole’s army has landed in Galway. Or else in Limerick. I doubt Reynold could tell them apart, or say if he was in Ireland or the Land of Nod. If his past wanderings are any guide, he will try to invade us by way of Madrid.’
Audley looks at him: how can you make a joke? He is solemnity personified, now he has been elected to the Garter, and has a chain and a new George shining on his breast.
When Lord Lisle got a permit to leave Calais for the Garter feast, he thought it a mark of favour. He is surprised to be ordered before the council, and questioned. It is an open secret that members of his household have quit their posts and made their way to Rome. The boy Mathew, among others, has brought home fat files of evidence. But the Lord Privy Seal has not got what he wants—one damning document, to link the Lord Deputy to Pole.
Rafe says, ‘At this point we usually arrest Francis Bryan, do we not? When we cannot make the answers fit the questions?’
He smiles. Bryan knows all about Calais, it is true. He could help bring Lisle down, maybe also the ambassador Valloppe. But who will believe Francis? The Vicar of Hell has drained too many cups. He has played too many hands, he has given too much offence: if you think in vino veritas, look at Francis. Yet he knows everybody’s secrets, and appears to be everybody’s cousin. He has friends in every treasury, watchmen at every port.
Rafe shrugs, as if trying to shift an ill-balanced load. We servants of the king must get used to games we cannot win but fight to an exhausted draw, their rules unexplained. Our instructions are full of snares and traps, which mean as we gain we lose. We do not know how to proceed from minute to minute, yet somehow we do, and another night falls on us in Greenwich, at Hampton Court, at Whitehall.
The king wonders aloud, what shall we do when knights of the Garter are found to be traitors—like Nicholas Carew? Certainly their names should be stricken from the volumes that contain the history of the order. But will that not mar the beauty of the pages?
The decision is that the disgraced name should remain. But the words ‘VAH! PRODITUR’ should be written in the margin, so the man is branded for ever.
Vah! He thinks of Gardiner, trying to cough up his tadpoles: by now his evil mind has swollen them, he will have to spew them as frogs. ‘The man he needs is St Aelred,’ Gregory says. ‘When the saint met with a swollen man clutching his belly, Aelred at once stuffed his fingers down the patient’s throat; he vomited, with his frogs, seven pints of bile.’
He says to his son, ‘I have some news for you. It is a blow, I must confess.’
In making him earl, the king has granted twenty-four manors in Essex, besides holdings in other counties. But in return he wants the manor of Wimbledon, and the house at Mortlake.
Gregory blinks. ‘Why?’
‘You know he cannot ride so far now. He wants to join one great park to another, so he can move west of London and still be on his own ground. I will show you the map. You will see the sense in it.’
He does not open his account books to work out how much money he has spent on his Mortlake house. He thought it would be his for life.
Gregory says, ‘You won’t miss your old haunts, surely?’
Since he was a child Gregory has moved in the orbit of princes. Putney’s nothing to him, those fields that Walter scrabbled for, the sheep-runs for which he fought his neighbours.
Gregory says, ‘Take heart, my lord father. Not only was Aelred good for stomach pains, he was sovereign for broken bones. He made the dumb to speak.’
He asks, ‘What did they say?’
When he judges the time is right, he sends men for Lisle: ten at night, to rouse him from his bed and take him to the Tower. He will order Bishop Sampson moved there too. It will be convenient to get their confessions together, as the facts are so enmeshed. He does not need the bishop arraigned, just in ward, out of the council and out of the pulpit. Cranmer will take the vacant place in the rota at Paul’s: it is time the lovers of scripture had their say. The other bishops should take warning by Sampson’s arrest. He has five names on his list. He lets that fact be known. Which names they are, he holds back.
Lisle, too, can be held till the evidence fits. In Calais he can be replaced with a man more active and competent. He thinks about Wyatt: why not? The French are frightened of Monsieur Hoyet. Though, as someone says, they hardly fear him as much as the English do.
The day after Lisle’s arrest, the man John Husee waits for him at dawn, to implore. He says to him, ‘Keep yourself out of this, Husee. You have been a good servant and deserve a better master.’
Honor Lisle is still in Calais. Mr Wriothesley says, ‘On consideration, sir, we should have secured her with her husband; of the two, she is the more papistical.’
‘She can be held at home,’ he says. ‘Arrange it, would you?’ He sees, in an instant and for the first time: I am not ruthless enough for Sir Thomas Wriothesley.
Now he tells Husee, ‘Lady Lisle were better, if she has letters, to surrender them rather than burn them. I am adept at construing the ashes.’
After the king gives permission for his uncle’s arrest, he retires to prayer. But he will not see Lord Lisle, for all his begging. The news has come from Scotland that his new wife has given King James a son. ‘I could have married that lady,’ the king says. ‘But my councillors were too slow to act, and unwilling.’
In the noble city of Ghent, the Emperor sits in a hall draped in black, dealing out fates. He strips the guilds of their privileges, levies a fine, impounds weapons and knocks down part of the walls as well as the principal abbey, announcing that he will build a fortress garrisoned with Spanish troops. He parades the chief citizens barefoot, in the smocks of penitents, nooses around their necks. The executions have gone on for a month.
In times past you have thought, if you have to get into bed with Charles or François, Charles is the less diseased. But now who can choose: two loathly partners, sweating and seeping? ‘They call our king a killer,’ he tells Brandon, ‘but when I compare—’
‘By God, they have gall!’ says the duke. ‘With all of his troubles with men and women both, with traitors and rebels and councillors false, I call him an anointed saint.’
Norfolk and Gardiner visit each other as they did before the duke went to France. His informants say, ‘Norfolk has the girl Katherine with him. At Gardiner’s house they played a masque. It was Magnificence. Sir, they played it against you.’
It is an old thing of Skelton’s, written against Wolsey in his time. When carters become courtiers, is the burden of it: how the upstart vaunts, how he sins, how the commonwealth is abused. The players are Collusion and Abusion, Folly and Mischief, and Magnificence himself, who proclaims:
I reign in my robes, I rule as me list,
I drive down these dastards with a dint of my fist.
But at length Magnificence is brought low, he is beaten and shamed, spoiled of all he has and plunged into poverty. Enter Despair, tempting him to make an end by stabbing or hanging himself, the sorriest knave that ever was damned.
Just in time comes Good Hope, and saves him.
But if you think your audience would prefer it, there is always the choice to end the play early, leaving Magnificence in the dust.
Rafe says, ‘Call-Me was there. At Gardiner’s masque.’
‘Was he?’ He is disturbed. ‘Looking after our interests, I am sure.’
Whispers have come from Gardiner’s private office. The bishop has set his people to look into Call-Me’s finances. They share territory in Hampshire; their business cannot help but be entangled, and if there is sharp practice, it could not long be hidden from the bishop. He says, ‘I wish Call- Me would come to me, and let us look at the figures together.’
Sometimes transactions have holes in them. Sometimes columns fail to tally. To mend the matter, it is possible to be ingenious, without being dishonest.
He says, ‘If Gardiner sends for Call-Me, he has no choice but to answer. If something is alleged against him he must hear what it is.’
He thinks, Wriothesley will accuse me of teaching him covetousness. I would have taught him accountancy, if he had ever sat still to listen. He says to Rafe, ‘Perhaps there is a deal to be done. Gardiner has much to hide himself, if someone cared to spy it out.’
After the evening of the masque, Katherine Howard does not return to her duties at court. The queen’s people report that Anna is relieved to see her go. But Anna does not know our history, or she would realise this bodes her no good. The maid has been re-installed at Lambeth, in her family’s house, but now she has maids of her own and is served with deference by those who hope she will carry them to high fortune. In the evenings, the king’s barge crosses the water. His minstrels play ‘The Jesters’s Dance’, and ‘La Manfredina’ and ‘My Lord and Lady Depart’. Henry stays with her till late, rowing back after sunset, the drums and flutes silent.
He thinks of the surgeons, their bloody book. Carved and pierced and sliced, Wound Man stands upright on the page. He holds out his arms, one half-severed at the wrist: ‘Come on, come on, what else have you got?’
He has kept his word to the king: a tractable Parliament has given the treasury what it needs. Before summer it will disperse, without a day appointed to meet again. Though he, Essex, has shed his duties as Secretary, he seems more pressed than ever, preparing for invisible dangers. If Pole is really heading to Ireland, his sails are not seen. Lord Admiral Fitzwilliam leaves his captains on watch, and returns to take his place in council.
The fact that Lord Lisle is in the Tower does not prevent him hurling accusations. The only way to stop him would be to stop asking questions. He insists that Lord Cromwell has acted as patron of all heretics in Calais these seven years past, circumventing justice and holding in contempt the king’s commands.
Lisle will not be specific, when and where and who. In his position, you would fling mud and hope it would stick. His wife is now under house arrest. He, Essex, is unsurprised to hear that the Lisles have not paid their household servants for two and a half years.
6 June, the king calls him in. ‘My lord, I hear you have been assailed.’
Assailed? ‘I am used to that.’
‘Insulted openly,’ the king says, ‘at the performance of a masque. But I have let it be known, that those who denigrate Cromwell, denigrate their king. It is for me, no one else, to reprove or reward my servants.’
They have not spoken—the king and his chief councillor—about the Duke of Norfolk’s niece. Now the king allows himself one angry outburst. ‘I pay a compliment to some sweet little fool, and the world says I am going to wed her. What have you done to counter this?’
He says, ‘It is Norfolk’s part to counter it. Besides, the world is answered, surely. Your Majesty cannot marry. He has a wife.’
Henry says, ‘Wilhelm was in Ghent. He saw the Emperor. They have reached some accommodation. Or else—I know not which—they have reached some impasse.’
Something is needling Henry, beyond the matter at hand, making him querulous, edgy. I will know by and by, he thinks, I shall not avoid knowing. He says, ‘We are not yet informed what has passed in Ghent. And I would not trust the first information. I never do.’
‘Well, it is you who gets it,’ Henry snaps. ‘I know letters come to you, that should come to me. I am obliged to send to your house, and be a suitor for knowledge of my own affairs. Surely someone can tell us whether Cleves and the Emperor have parted friends? For if they have not, then it signals war. It is no good to go to Parliament and get me the subsidy, my lord, if it is spent at once, on a war I do not want, for a man who uses me ill—’
‘I do not believe Wilhelm will go to war.’
‘Oh? Then you think he is making terms with the Emperor? Behind my back? I have long suspected Cleves is not honest. He wants to play me and the Emperor both. He wants the surety of my troops behind him, so he can stand up and make demands of Charles. He wants Charles to give him the Duchess Christina, and he will try to keep Guelders too.’
‘A bold scheme,’ he says, ‘but he might contrive it. Would you not do the same?’
‘Perhaps if I had no conscience,’ Henry says, ‘and no fear. No sense of duty owed. Perhaps if this were twenty years back. Your man Machiavelli claims that fortune favours the young.’
‘He isn’t my man.’
‘No? Then who is?’
‘You were seen in the mirror of princes, before I ever showed my face. You lack no art or craft to rule.’
‘And yet,’ Henry says, ‘you break my heart. You claim, all I think and do is for you, sir. But you refuse to extricate me from this unholy, unsanctified misalliance. You would leave me cursed—without hope of further offspring, allied to heresy, and exposed to the peril and expense of war.’
‘Excuse me,’ he says. He walks across the gallery, to where the sunlight floods in, and hides from him the sight of a knot of courtiers, staring at him from a distance. He thinks, I am walking above the clouds.
He turns. ‘Your Majesty keeps Christina’s portrait behind a curtain.’
‘I could have had her,’ Henry says, ‘if you had pleased. Nothing would satisfy Cromwell, but I must wed a Lutheran’s sister.’
‘Your Majesty knows, I think, that Duke Wilhelm is not a Lutheran. Like your Majesty, he walks his own path, a guiding light to his people.’
The king begins to speak—then hesitates, abdicating from his own thoughts. When he continues, it is lightly, as if he is trying out a joke. ‘Norfolk has asked me, how much was Cromwell paid, to arrange the Cleves match?’
‘He knows where I get my income, I have no doubt. As you do, sir.’
Still that buoyancy in Henry’s voice: ‘I told you, nothing is secret from me. Norfolk says, “And besides what he received to make the match, what is he paid to arrange the continuance?” It must be a huge sum, Norfolk thinks, for you to run against my displeasure, ever since the turn of the year.’
He must pick his words carefully: make no promises he cannot keep. ‘I will do what I can, but if you repudiate the queen, I cannot avert evil consequences.’
‘Are you threatening me?’ Henry asks.
‘God forbid.’
‘He does.’
The king turns away and stares at the wall. As if he has become entranced by the panelling, absorbed into the linenfold.
Next day he is not due to see the king. But he half-expects some message. Henry loves to run you about the countryside, cries of ‘Urgent, Urgent,’ sounding in your ears, like the cries of hounds on the scent.
A letter comes. He reads and digests it: the king’s orders. He files it. He waits to be summoned: nothing. He pulls the letter out of his files, and gives it to Wriothesley: he thinks, Call-Me will pull it out anyway, his curiosity will get the better of him, and if he is reporting to Gardiner—well, let him. These next few days, we must try conclusions.
Wriothesley says, the letter in his hand, ‘The king would not elevate you, sir, only to destroy you. And he would not make these requests, if he did not mean you to see them through.’
The Book Called Henry: never say what he will not do. He sits down. ‘I understand he wishes a resolution with the queen’s grace. But my difficulty is, I must break it to the council as news, that the marriage is not consummated. I can tell Fitzwilliam, the king says. And one or two others if I must. Whereas everybody knows already. They know the thing failed at the outset.’
He passes a hand across his face. His Irish files lie untouched. It is supper time, and he does not want his supper, and Secretary Wriothesley looks as if he has no appetite either. Which is a pity, as Wyatt has sent early strawberries from Kent.
Call-Me says, ‘You can work with the pre-contract, sir. You have done more difficult things. We would have to find a pension for the lady. And whatever the brother demands, by way of recompense. Though as she is still a maid, Cleves may find her another husband, and that would be a relief to our exchequer.’
He thinks, Anna may feel she has had enough of men. His fingers inside her. C’est tout.
‘To save the king’s face,’ Call-Me says, ‘we will mention his scruples. The fear that the lady might be unfree, and contracted to Lorraine, weighed so heavy on the king’s mind, that he determined to leave her intact, till the matter should be resolved. Which it has not—’
‘But why should I attempt—?’ he says.
‘—and by now the king believes, as any man would, that the councillors of Cleves deliberately delay—’
‘—why should I? If Anna goes, in comes Norfolk with his little drab on his arm. He thought he could rule through his other niece, but Anne knocked him back. This one will be tractable, you can tell by looking at her. Norfolk believes he can put me out of the council, and he and his new friend Gardiner will lead us back to Rome. But I won’t go, Call-Me. I’ll fight. And when you see Stephen again, you can tell him so from me.’
He sees Wriothesley shrink, like a dog under the whip. He is whimpering beneath his burden of knowledge, as all the king’s creatures do.
That night he dreams he is at Whitehall, on the spiral stair that leads to the cockpit. Here below ground the gamecocks circle, red birds and white, their feathers raised into ruffs. Here they sport, rising with a flurry of wings into the air, talons locked: flailing with steel spurs, pecking at eyes, gouging breasts and ripping wings. Here one dies, while the specators roar and stamp; spattered with blood, they slap palms and pay their debts. The dead cock is raked from the sand and thrown to a cur.
In the morning he is at Westminster, where he attends the sitting of the Lords. He dines. At three in the afternoon he is making his way to the council chamber, Audley at his side, Fitzwilliam behind him. Norfolk flitters through the sunlight, either before or behind, conversing with minions who have their swords at their sides.
It is a boisterous day, and as they cross the court the wind takes his hat off. He grabs at it, but it is gone, bowling in the direction of the river.
He looks around the party, and the nape of his neck bristles. The councillors make no move to uncover. They continue walking. He strides out as if to shake them off, but they bunch around him, matching their pace to his.
‘An ill wind,’ he says, ‘to take off my hat, and leave yours.’ He remembers Wolf Hall, the still evening, Henry’s arm around his shoulders. The interior of the house opened before them; musicians played the king’s song, ‘If love now reigned’, and together they strolled in for their supper.
Now the sunlight picks out a silver thread in the stuff of Lord Audley’s jacket. It dapples the Lord Admiral’s coat of blue brocade. It makes a red flicker at the corner of his eye and he puts his hand to his chest, over his heart, but his knife is not there: only silk, linen, skin. Rafe was right, of course. When you need it you can’t use it.
From below, a tug at his sleeve. ‘You lost this, my lord Essex?’
The little lad is puffed with pride: at the hat retrieval, and at knowing which lord is which. He reaches for a coin, looks into the upturned face. ‘Don’t I know you? You used to bring rushes to York Place.’
‘Bless you,’ the boy says, ‘that would be my brother Charles. I am George, I am as like to him as my mother could form me. It’s easy to mistake us and many do it. But Charles—’ He reaches up, to show the size his brother is now.
‘He must be,’ he says. When Charles carried rushes, Anne Boleyn was a mere marquise: and because he was on his way to her lair, Charles had asked him, ‘Have you a holy medal, to protect you?’
He says, ‘Commend me to your brother. I hope he thrives? And you too, master. Thank you for my hat.’
He thinks he sees Stephen Gardiner, a black shape against rosy brick. Where are the secretaries, he thinks, one or both should attend … His throat is dry. His heart is shaking. His body knows, and his head is catching up; meanwhile, we are bound for a council meeting.
They have passed undercover. The summer day recedes. He thinks, I have parted with my last supporter there: George whooping across the close, spinning his reward in the air. He cannot see Riche. He thinks, Wyatt told me Charles Brandon would not help me, and he cannot if he would, he is not here. But Norfolk has stolen in behind him. Flodden Norfolk, a father named after a battle: how do you like that, Cromwell?
He thinks, my father Walter would not have left his knife at home. If my father were here, I would not be afraid. But the enemy would. If Walter were here, they would be crouching under the council board, pissing themselves.
He looks around. ‘Is my lord archbishop on his way?’
Fitzwilliam says, ‘We do not expect him.’
Gardiner has followed them in. He is blocking the door. ‘What’s this, Winchester?’ he says. ‘Are you back on the council?’
‘Imminently,’ Gardiner says.
‘We’ll see how long that lasts, shall we? Anyone take a bet?’ He sits. ‘Our numbers are down. But shall we begin?’
Fitzwilliam says, ‘We do not sit down with traitors.’
He is ready for them—on his feet, his jaw set, his eyes narrowed, his breath short. Norfolk says, ‘I will tear out your heart and stuff it in your mouth.’ The clerks, their folios held across their chests, have stepped back to let the king’s halberdiers fill the room. The councillors fall on him. Like pack animals they yelp and snarl, they grunt and flail. Fitzwilliam is trying to pull his Garter badge from his coat. He bats him away, gives Norfolk a shove that knocks him into the table. But Fitzwilliam comes back. They tug, kick, haul. He is barged and buffeted, his gold chain is off, and he puts his head down, he puts his fists up, he lands a blow, and he is roaring, he is convulsed with rage, he does not know what he says, nor cares: and then it is over. They have taken the chain and the George. Someone has swept his papers from the board.
William Kingston is a big man and the councillors fall back for him. ‘My lord? You must come with these guards.’ He speaks like a man with perfect faith. ‘You will walk with me advisedly. I will hold fast by your side and lead you through the crowd.’
There is only one place Kingston leads you. At the sight of Kingston with a warrant, the lord cardinal’s great heart failed him. His legs would not hold him up, and he sat down on a chest; he made his lament and said his prayers.
In the doorway, Gardiner says, ‘Adieu, Cromwell.’
He stops. ‘Give me my title.’
‘You have no title. It’s gone, Cromwell. You are no more than God made you. May He take you to his mercy.’
The sunlight whites out the spectators. The councillors surge out after him. Evidently they will do no business; or they regard it as done.
He thinks, the only man who could help me now is the man who shot Packington. He might not succeed with so many targets. Where would I direct his aim?
There is a boat waiting for him. It has been organised so neatly you would think he had done it himself. A two-minute brawl, he thinks, but they must have reckoned on that. Perhaps somebody gets a fist in his face—but there are so many against one. They know the end of it all. They dust themselves off, they bundle me out.
Today is 10 June. It was three in the afternoon when he crossed the court and lost his hat. It is not yet four. There are hours of daylight left. He says to Kingston, ‘My lord archbishop is not arrested?’
‘I have had no such order,’ Kingston says brusquely; then adds, ‘Be easy in your mind about that.’
‘Gregory?’
‘I saw your son in the Commons, an hour ago. I have no orders there.’
‘And Sir Rafe?’ He is careful about titles today.
‘It is possible he was waylaid, to keep him from the meeting. But again, I have no orders about Master Secretary.’
He does not ask, what about Wriothesley? He says, ‘Will you send for someone from my household, to wait on me till I am released?’
Kingston says, ‘It is not our custom to leave a gentleman without a servant. Give us a name and he will be fetched.’
‘Send to Austin Friars, and ask for Christophe.’
He thinks, they have bruised me, but it will not hurt until tomorrow. The water rocks beneath them, cerulean blue. The Tower is in sight. The flint sparkles like sunlight on the sea.