LONDON, AUTUMN–WINTER 1536
Aske: he is a petty gentleman, but the king places him at once—second cousin to Harry Percy, and kin to the Cliffords of Skipton Castle. Mr Wriothesley, newly attuned to the king’s mind, marvels at Henry’s knowledge of obscure family ties. In calling the process of the rebels a pilgrimage, Aske lends it the colour of piety. The aim of the Pilgrims, at divers times stated, is to have vile blood drained from the king’s council, and the nobility of England set up again; to have Christ’s laws kept, and restitution for injuries (as they call them) done to the church. Aske enforces an oath on those who come in his path.
He knows Robert Aske—to nod to, anyway. He is a member of Gray’s Inn, sometimes in London on business for the Percy family. Being a lawyer, Aske cannot claim ignorance. He is aware it is a gross presumption to offer oaths in the name of the king. And he must foresee—for he must be acquainted with the chronicles—what the end will be: how rank the puddle in which he swims and will one day sink.
We have all grown up on tales of Jack Straw and John Amend-All—those brave days when the commons marched on London and killed the judges and foreigners. They pissed in rich men’s beds, tore up their poetry books, and used altar cloths to wipe their arses. Their leaders were mean clerks and spoiled priests, Straw and Miller and Carter and Tyler, none of whom went by their right names; as for Amend-All, he is immortal, a self-made man green as spring, who noses up from his common grave whenever mutiny stirs. These rebels wrecked palaces and stormed the Tower of London itself. They smashed whatever they could find to smash—there were not so many mirrors in those days. On Cheapside they set a chopping block, and demanded the heads of fifteen of the king’s councillors, including the Lord Privy Seal. If they could not catch the men they were hunting, they hung up their coats instead and shot them with arrows.
In those days the King of England was a child. There was no good governance. Labourers and craftsmen were oppressed by statute, every trade on a set wage, whatever the price of grain. They endured the poll tax—no wonder that they set the heads of its begetters on spikes. Yet all the while, like Robert Aske, they called themselves loyal subjects, and shouted, ‘God bless our king.’
It is a hundred and fifty years since that broil. It is eighty years or more since Jack Cade called himself Captain of Kent and led his rabble to London Bridge. But to the rustici, you might as well say it happened last Easter, or before the Conquest. They say they want no taxes and will pay none, and they protest against imposts never levied and never imagined. And as the king says to him—when did you hear of a tax so light and pleasant that every man clamoured to pay it?
The common folk of England live on songs and tales and alehouse jokes. Spending their pence on candles to burn before holy images, they live in the dark, and in the dark take fright. Let us say a calf is born dead. By the time the tale crosses a field, it is a calf with two heads. Cross a stream, and it is a calf with two heads, chanting backwards in Latin, and some friar is charging a shilling for a charm against it. So it goes, in half a day, from abortion to Antichrist: and somehow, everybody is poorer except the priests. Pastors warn their flock that if they do not send tribute to Rome, trees will walk and crops will blight. They make them dread the fire of purgatory, which eats to the bone; they ask, can you bear to see your dead folk burning—your helpless old mother, your dead little children, bound in agony and screaming for your prayers?
Now it is hard for them to hear the gospel news: there is no purgatory, only judgement. God is not a market trader, selling mercy by the pound. You cannot buy salvation, nor can you delegate a monk to work out your salvation for you.
‘In Lincolnshire,’ Mr Wriothesley says, ‘they believed the Pope was coming to their aid, in his own person.’
The king snorts. ‘They may as well say, a giraffe is coming. They do not know what a pope is.’
Perhaps they do not know what a king is either. Their leaders tell them that Henry has made himself God. Now if a child falls sick between Truro and Newcastle, they lay it at the king’s door; if a well dries, if the butter spoils, if a bucket leaks: everything that is out of joint with them, from a fall of hailstones to a cricked neck, they blame on the court and council. Their grievances run like streams underground, welling up from the Scots border to Dover, till the whole land is flooded with nonsense. How is it some verse against Cromwell, sung in the street in Falmouth, is chanted next day in Chester? The further he travels from London, the stranger Cromwell gets. In Essex he is a scheming swindler, a blasphemer and renegade Jew. Spread him east to Lincoln and he is notorious for his knowledge of poisons. In the dales of Yorkshire he is a magus, with the stars and moon on his coat, while in Carlisle he is a ghoul who steals children and eats their hearts.
He, Lord Cromwell, goes to London, to keep his hand on the city. The rebels have no cannon, but London’s walls are ornamental these days, you could knock them down with a dirty look. The Pilgrims boast they will strip the city bare and carry the glitter back to their caves. London dreads the north. Old people recall how Richard the usurper brought his outlanders down, bare-legged and wild-eyed, their speech uncouth, their actions worse: they burned ledgers for fuel, and would kill a man’s geese in his own backyard.
At the Rolls House and Austin Friars, he receives the city worthies, to soothe them and spur them on. At the Tower he ships out the king’s armaments and melts plate into coin. Then he hurries back to Windsor to parse true and false news and head the king’s council; whoever is notionally in charge, he writes the agenda. All information that comes in, if it is fresh, is wrong: if it is stale, it is possibly accurate, but also useless. Every order that goes out from the king contains its countermand: if this has occurred, do that, but if you are delayed or deceived, by no means do the other, but write and ask us. Be cautious but don’t delay. Strike boldly, but not too expensively. Use your judgement, but refer all to the king. The commanders in Lincoln, in Ampthill, in Yorkshire are trying to will themselves inside the heads of the councillors in Windsor, while the councillors strain to see far-off rills and bogs, dells and crags, cattle droves and goat tracks: terrain they have never visited, even in dreams.
Luckily, Lord Cromwell has been everywhere. He knows the eastern ports, the castles on the high fells. For the cardinal he used to ride to Durham. He could go north himself, get more certain news, and escort some of the king’s treasure to pay the troops. ‘But suppose they seized your person?’ Mr Wriothesley says. ‘Suppose they asked a ransom?’
‘How much do you think Henry would pay? He should set my value against what I bring in to the treasury.’
Richard Riche frowns. ‘And he should estimate, my lord, what you might bring in years to come, should God spare you.’
Call-Me suppresses a smile. Riche says, ‘Why the sneer, Wriothesley?’
‘It is not for any rebel to know Lord Cromwell’s worth.’
Riche turns on him. ‘You are not named in their songs, are you? Obscurity has its merits.’
Gregory says encouragingly, ‘They will hate you once they know you, Call-Me.’
He says, ‘I am sure you have deserved ill of them. They cannot find a rhyme for you, that’s all. They are worse poets than Tom Truth.’
An army must be supplied. With the king’s forces go the harness-makers and blacksmiths, the armourers, purveyors of soup kettles, bowstrings, blankets, buckets, trivets, rivets: and unless they are to go unpaid you need clerks to keep accounts, and the clerks need inkhorns and parchment and wax for seals. Each man in the field needs ale or beer, bacon and beef, salt fish and cheese, biscuits baked and not too old, peas or beans to boil in salt liquor, and a pot to boil them in. To get these things you need ready cash in a strongbox. When you are at war a promise will not do.
And as for the greater business of the realm—it does not stop because some arsewipes in the shires are waving pitchforks. Marriages are made and children born, and children grow and need new gowns, new household goods and minders. It is time Anne Boleyn’s child began learning her letters. The Lady Mary longs for an infant of her own to love and in default she tries to love her half-sister; the child cannot be blamed, she says, for what her mother was. As her features emerge from baby flesh, Eliza is beginning to resemble less a piglet and more the king, so these days no one suggests she is Norris’s by-blow. No child should be left floating queasily, in the space between fathers. She is still a bastard, of course. But even a bastard daughter has value on the marriage market, if the King of England acknowledges her: so her education should be that of a princess.
He has arranged a stipend for a young woman, Cat Champernowne, whom he knows to be kind and a good Latinist. He trusts Eliza will live to thank him. It is important a child’s first tutor should be gentle and like a mother, so the child is not afraid of making mistakes. Look at Gregory, who now promises so well. His first tutor was Margaret Vernon, who was prioress at Little Marlow—a small house which closed this summer. Margaret has visited him in London, to exclaim over her pupil, his height, his looks, his manners. ‘Where have the years gone? It seems only yesterday since he was learning his Pater Noster.’
No one should think he hates nuns, or monks either. Many of them have been his friends. He used to ride up to Little Marlow, making business in the neighbourhood. His mother-in-law Mercy said, ‘What does she look like, this Margaret Vernon?’
He understood the question. ‘She’s not young.’
Gregory prospered with her. Now she must prosper in her turn. He makes a note: Margaret Vernon to Malling, Kent. Malling is a solid house, she will be well enough there: for as long as Malling lasts.
He thinks of Dorothea. He draws a monster in the margin of his papers. He thinks about Dr Agostino and his potions. If there is a mystery about the cardinal’s death, he is no nearer to solving it. The solution, he must suppose, lies in the heart of the king.
When he goes to the queen’s private apartments with Rafe and Call-Me, he finds her seated as usual among her women. Today everybody is sewing and no one singing; the queen’s neckline is edged with goldsmiths’ work, from which depend single fat pearls in the shape of tears. ‘Highness,’ he says, ‘why not ask the king to fetch Lady Mary here?’
‘That would cheer us up,’ Jane Rochford says. ‘She is famous for her japes.’
The women hide their smiles. He says, ‘I think Lady Mary’s health would improve with gentle company.’
‘Do you?’ Rochford says. ‘I suppose it were pity if she went on praying till she wore out her knees. In the country one loses any looks one has.’
‘Lady Rochford speaks from experience,’ says Edward Seymour’s wife.
Rochford says, ‘If Mary is here with us, the rebels cannot take her. Nor she, for that matter, resort to them.’
‘She would never do so,’ he says. ‘I have her pledge.’
Rochford folds her hands, smiling.
Jane the queen says, ‘I would like her company, myself. I could ask the king. But he is displeased with me. Because I am not, yet.’
‘With child,’ Jane Rochford supplies.
The queen says, ‘I hear agates are helpful. You lay them next the skin.’
‘No doubt the Wardrobe will have some,’ Rafe says. ‘If not, we will get them. In Cornwall you can practically pick them up in the street.’
The queen looks surprised. ‘In Cornwall? Do they have a street?’
Call-Me steps forward, ‘If I may suggest, my lord Privy Seal? We might rehearse her Highness in a pretty speech? We might approach his Majesty by first praising him.’
Sound, he thinks. Let’s try it. ‘“Sir,”’ he begins, ‘“you have raised me to a sphere apart.”’
‘He has,’ Jane says. ‘And I heartily congratulate you, Lord Cromwell.’
‘No, your Highness,’ Jane Rochford explains. ‘That is not what Cromwell says, that is what you say. “Sir, you have been pleased to set me above all other Englishwomen.”’
‘“I all unworthy,”’ Wriothesley offers.
‘“I unworthy,”’ he says, ‘that’s very good—“exalting me into a sphere apart. With whom then can I be at ease? There is no lady of my rank with whom I can share a confidence.”’
‘Then continue,’ Rafe suggests, ‘“Sir, out of your liberality and generous, fatherly heart, please to let the Lady Mary come to court, so that I may have comfort in her society, and be merry.”’
‘Let me try it,’ Jane says. She takes a breath. ‘Sir, out of your liberality…’ Is it his liberality, or his something else?’
‘Liberality has a fine ring to it,’ Rafe urges.
‘Then we’ll proceed with liberality,’ Jane says, ‘and see where it gets us. But Lord Cromwell, I must raise a matter with you—’ She nods to the ladies. They exchange glances and withdraw. Rafe, Wriothesley, both fall back. For a moment, unspeaking, the queen watches her court recede. Then she detaches from her girdle a small flask for rosewater. ‘It is of great antiquity,’ she says. ‘The king gave it me. He says it is Roman.’
The glass in his hand is darkened, fragile as air. ‘It’s possible.’
‘Once it contained a sacred relic. He did not say of which saint.’ As if anticipating his question she says, ‘I don’t ask. I wait to be told.’
‘I do the same.’
‘The king tells me his dreams.’ He wonders at the expression of dread on her face. ‘He talks about when he was a child.’
‘Women want to know about a man’s childhood.’ It had not struck him before, but he has never known a woman shun an anecdote, however mendacious.
‘It is because they wish to love them,’ Jane says. ‘They cannot always love the man, but they think they could love the child he was.’
He feels unease. The glass is only a diversion—but from what? ‘The king was a very handsome child,’ he says. ‘So it is reported.’
‘Lady Rochford,’ the queen says, ‘could you stand off, please? No—further off. With the other ladies. Thank you.’ She turns her face to him, her expression opening like a flower. ‘He talks about his brother Arthur. He thinks he killed him.’
He is startled into simplicity. ‘He didn’t kill him. He just died.’
‘He killed him with envy—with wishing against him. Even when he was very young, when he was Duke of York, he wished to be a king himself, even if not King of England. It was his intention, he says, to reconquer France, then Arthur would give it him as a reward.’
‘Highness, wishes do not kill people.’
‘Nor prayers?’ Jane says. ‘It is wicked to pray for our advantage at the expense of another. But we cannot always help what comes into our head.’
He says, ‘There must be a mechanism. Like a gun or a knife or a disease.’
‘But then, Henry says, he imagined all the misfortunes that might overtake his French war. Such as flux, mud, penury.’
‘That was sage, in one so young.’
‘But he thought, I should like to be a king anyway. And God read his heart. And so Arthur died, and Henry inherited all his brother’s dignities and titles, and married Katherine his wife.’
‘Or tried to marry her,’ he says. He feels tired. ‘It was not a real marriage, of course, that is established.’
‘And Arthur never came home,’ Jane says, ‘but lies in a tomb at Worcester cathedral, where they left him at dead of winter. And Henry never goes to see him.’
After a moment she says, ‘My lord? You are going to stand there and not speak?’
He says, ‘Why now?’ Cranmer and I believed we had vanquished that spectre: in one winter’s night of persuasion and prayer, refined Arthur into thin air. But it seems Henry withheld something. We took him for the helpless victim of a spirit, rudely appearing. We did not know his shame fetched it.
He says, ‘If the king raises the matter I shall say it was a child’s fantasy, and he should dwell on it no more.’
‘Thank you. I tried my brother, Lord Hertford, in this matter. But he said, “Tush, sister, superstition.”’
‘Did he?’ He smiles.
‘You may go,’ the queen says. ‘If anyone asks what we spoke of, tell them I wanted to show you the glass and know about the Romans. I do not believe everything the king tells me.’
Rafe and Call-Me follow him out. They are twitching with curiosity. Call-Me says, ‘Do you think she will make bold and ask? About Mary?’
Rafe says, ‘I hope she will, because if Mary is here, no misunderstandings can arise, about who she meets or writes to.’
‘You see?’ Lady Rochford is behind them. ‘Even your own people do not trust Mary. But she will come with all speed. I hear she pines for you, Lord Cromwell.’
He takes her arm and steers her away. She is his ally, like it or not. She snaps, ‘I have deserved gentler treatment at your hands. And at the queen’s, I may say.’
He lets go. She rubs her arm, as if he had injured her. He thinks, if wishes were death, I would be superfluous to the state. Henry hated both his wives at divers times, but they spitefully lived on, until God put an end to one, the French executioner to the other. Henry could not wish them away, for all his power. Only I could do that. It is I who tell him who he can marry and unmarry and who he can marry next, and who and how to kill.
But perhaps it will not matter, he thinks. Perhaps the Yorkshiremen will come and slay us all.
The queen makes her request before Henry in sight of the court. Note his alert face, the modest inclination of her head. ‘Sir,’ she begins, ‘out of my unworthiness, you have been—what?—liberal. I am in a sphere. Please to bring the Lady Mary to court. I may have comfort in her society, and share a confidence.’
Henry looks at her in tender bewilderment. ‘Are you lonely, sweetheart? Of course we will have her, if it will make you merry.’
‘Merry. That was the word I forgot.’ Jane does not smile. She sinks low to the ground, collapsed inside a stiff tent of brocade and satin. ‘Will you hear me?’
What now? He tries to catch Rochford’s eye, but the whole assembly is staring at the queen. ‘My heart is moved, sir, by the divisions that arise between your subjects and your most sacred self.’
There is a rustle of consternation. This is not Jane’s own language, surely?
Henry gazes at her. ‘I take these words as they are meant. A queen has a double duty. As a wife, she feels for her husband when he is troubled. As a queen, she feels as a subject to her lord.’
‘I am only a woman,’ Jane says. ‘I do not presume to be wiser than your Grace. But my heart misgives when honourable and devout customs are left off, sanctified by usage since the world began. We must cherish them, as a son or daughter will cherish an aged father.’
Henry frowns. ‘What customs?’
‘Nan!’ he says to Edward’s wife. ‘Nan, quick.’
Lady Seymour steps forward, ‘Madam—’
Jane says, ‘Your people want the Pope of Rome. They want the statues they have known all their lives, and blessed candles, and holy days.’
Nan Seymour is urgent: ‘Madam—’
‘Let her be,’ Henry says. ‘She should be instructed, and who but I should do it? How is it, that for all the preachers who set forth the king’s supremacy, for all that has been said and written, there are still those who do not grasp that the Bishop of Rome is merely a foreign prince, out to conquer if he can? Madam, I will have no alien interfere with my rule, and I will allow no traitor to shelter behind the cross of Christ.’
Jane says, ‘They think you will take their silver crosses and turn them into coin.’
Henry says, ‘The simple people may believe it, but who leads them to do so? What manner of pastors are they, the priests and abbots who break their oath to me, and are first in the fray, swords in their hands?’
‘They would still pray for the king,’ Jane says, as if bargaining, ‘if they could pray for the Pope too.’
He thinks, I must end this if the king will not. ‘Madam, there can be no double jurisdiction. Either the king rules, or Rome.’
‘And it is not a question,’ Wriothesley warns.
Henry says, ‘Her Grace will withdraw.’
Jane is shaking. ‘They are too much burdened with taxes.’
The king leans forward. ‘The burdens of tax do not rest on the shoulders of labourers, or small husbandmen. Dives, the rich man, knows and has always known how to pass off his interests as the interests of Lazarus, the beggar.’
Jane stares at him. ‘Yes. Possibly. I do not understand the subsidy or the revenue. But my lord—take care of your thoughts as well as your deeds. What you say by night haunts you by day, and what you refuse by day will return by night.’
Nan Seymour takes one arm, Jane Rochford takes the other; they lift her to her feet. The king says, ‘Jane, understand this—I dispose for my subjects, body and soul. A prince answers before the strait court of Heaven for his proceedings, and when he dies will be judged by standards of which ordinary men are quit. God gives him graces: God gives him wisdom, policy and prudence, and these virtues are his to exercise, by methods of which he is the only arbiter. I am the earthly shepherd of God’s sheep. It is a prince’s part to provide not only for noble families but for obscure ones, and not only for scholars and magistrates but for the untutored and the poor, for the whole commonwealth of his people—both for their corporeal welfare, and their spiritual good.’ He adds, benign, ‘The duty is laid on me, and the world shall see me discharge it.’
‘Amen to that,’ Mr Wriothesley says. The courtiers clasp their hands together—they would applaud, if the king gave the nod. The Lord Chancellor murmurs, ‘Eloquence, sir.’ There is a rumble of appreciation from Sampson, Bishop of Chichester; the Earl of Oxford, who is Lord Chamberlain, sighs like a farm-girl in a feather bed.
The king says, ‘We are willing to consider all lawful petitions. Willing to spare any ceremony or image, if it is not baneful. However.’ He lifts his eyes, and positions his gaze deliberately above the head of his wife. ‘When you are fruitful, that will be the time we give ear to your complaint.’
As the women draw Jane away, ‘Follow,’ he says curtly, to Rafe, to Call- Me. He wants this crowd dispersed. It is like when a cart overturns in the street. ‘Pass along,’ the constables shout. ‘Nothing to see, pass on.’
Wriothesley catches his arm. ‘Has Carew been with her? Or the Courtenays?’
‘Perhaps,’ he says, ‘it proceeds from her own misled and gentle heart. She lacks good companions. I wish her sister Bess Oughtred might be got from the north.’
Rafe slaps his arm to alert him: Lady Rochford at sword’s length. She says, ‘I hope you don’t blame me.’
He says, ‘It hadn’t occurred to me. But now that you mention it…’
He thinks, you have destroyed one queen, is one enough?
Richard Cromwell writes from the town of Lincoln, which has now been seized back for the king. The gentlemen are disappointed that the foe has melted away. They went out to shed blood, not to parlay. Richard feels cheated himself, it is clear. The work he does, doorkeeper to his uncle, is not warlike enough for his nature.
Charles Brandon, to pin Lincolnshire down, will need to reserve a force and keep it in the field for the duration. ‘What is Charles doing?’ the king says. ‘I hope he is not too lenient. He should make an example of these beasts. Their women will creep to him, I suppose, and sue for pardon. Charles cannot abide to see a woman weep.’
‘We are none of us indifferent to it,’ he says. Henry stares at him.
It has never been possible to count the king’s subjects—not with certainty. Only the angels know how many are baptised and how many buried. We have the muster rolls of years past to see what each district can marshal: what archers, pikemen, how many horse and foot; how many helmets and coats of mail, what spears, war hammers, poll axes, swords; what gentlemen they have to lead them, whether novices or veterans. But we do not have windows into hearts, to say who is true. There is no single enemy, there is no one place he is; when one head is cut off then, Hydra-like, he grows another. They are rising in Cumberland and Westmorland and as far south as Derbyshire. In the towns of north Yorkshire they gather ten thousand strong. From Durham they descend with the banner of St Cuthbert, streaming silks of crimson and white. In Cumberland, four captains go in procession with relics before them. They have trumpeters, and heralds crying out their names: Captains Pity and Charity, Poverty and Faith.
He has their true names: Rob Mounsey and Tom Burbeck, Gilbert Whelpdale, John Beck. Captain Cobbler, the great traitor of Louth, is a shoemaker by trade, as his name may well attest: under his real name, Nicholas Melton, he will answer when the day comes. Meanwhile we can guess, from reports reliable and unreliable, that in the north fifty thousand men are in the field. There is no army the king can command or deploy that can meet, outmanoeuvre or halt such a force.
So: talking must hold the rebels back. But by now the king hardly wants to talk. He does not ask if the rebels’ demands are reasonable. He says he is their sovereign and they have no right to make any demands at all.
At his palace in Kenninghall, the Duke of Norfolk chafes and fumes, igniting himself like one of the rebel beacons, firing off several letters a day. He burns to fight: release him to go north; he will go tonight, by God, he will not be stayed! He will even serve under Brandon, he pleads. In Windsor young men pass the duke’s letters around, smirking: they are all Lord Cromwell’s servants, his discepoli, flocked after him from London. They see out the day with him, eating and drinking and talking of God and man till the candles burn down; and they see it in with him, keen as little dogs that scratch your door at first light.
The weather is not fit to hunt, so the grooms who keep the king’s outer apartments do not stir much before six. They rise by custom, by regulation, for unless he is sick or at the chase the king’s mornings are the same. The grooms rouse the esquires of the body, who take up their pallets, wash and dress themselves and carry in the king’s under-linen. It is they who hear the king’s first words each day, his first prayers, and report any special requests he has, so Lord Cromwell may see them on their way to fulfilment. One day Henry says, his voice sleepy, ‘Could you fetch Norris?’
They gape at each other. Each man struck dumb. The king pushes back the coverlet, as if impatient.
‘Sir,’ one ventures, ‘Norris is dead.’
The king yawns. ‘What?’ He spoke out of his dream, and as his feet hit the floor, he has forgotten it.
But the grooms stumble out, babbling: ‘My lord Cromwell…’
‘He must have been half-asleep. But tell me if he asks for Norris again.’
Mr Wriothesley laughs. ‘Why, are you going to supply him?’
Riche says, ‘You cannot raise the dead.’
‘No? That’s not my experience.’
He nods to the esquires: they bow in their turn, and go in to Henry with their perfumes and linen cloths. It is their honour to rub down the king’s person till his skin is tender and pink, then raise the lids of cedar chests and shake out his shirts, soft as April air. All those garments are gone long since, that Katherine embroidered with Spanish blackwork, and now they are stitched by paid and proficient hands, with lions and laurel crowns.
Hovering beyond the door, inventories in hand, is the Yeoman of the Wardrobe. A page bears a box of jewellery so the king can make choice; but first the king sits on his velvet stool for his barber. While his beard is trimmed and his hair combed his physicians come in, and gather in a black knot with their basins and urine flasks. They smell his breath, and enquire into his sleep and dreams.
The poor labourer owns his sleep and his stool, and can sell his piss to the fuller, whereas the king’s piss and stool is the property of all England, and every fantasy that disturbs his night hours is recorded somewhere in a book of dreams, which is written in the clouds massing over the fields and forests of his realm: every stir of lust, every frightful waking. Should he be costive, he is ordered a potion; should his bowel be loose, its product is taken away in a bowl under an embroidered cloth. They can only judge what is within him, by what comes out: a pity he is not made of glass.
Then a signal passes room to room, hot water comes in a silver ewer, and cloths of diamond weave and the softest nap: scissors clink in a basin, and the most deft of the esquires cleans and re-bandages the sore leg. The process brings tears to the king’s eyes. He jerks his chin away, and studies the tapestry or the ceiling. ‘All done, sir,’ they say, as if to a little child.
Unsteadily, he stands: is Cromwell there, any news? In his closet he kneels at his prie-dieu, his chaplain ready beyond the lattice. The king’s prayers are Latin prayers, and his hand beats his breast: his head bows, for we are all sinners, we sin as we breathe. Why is it when our eyes water with pain our mouth fills with the taste of phlegm and blood? Why do tears sting, after they have been blinked away? With a creak of wood he stands, leaving the cleric in a private cloud of incense: and as soon as he leaves his inner rooms, a laundress creeps in for yesterday’s shirts and the soiled bandages, and the king’s bed is unmade, the sheets tossed onto the floor, his velvet coverlets shaken and folded: beating and scrubbing begins, scouring, for no speck of dust can ever come under his eye, lurking in the pinions of a carved angel, or in the plaster curls of a Wild Man, or between the toes of a marble god.
Once the king leaves his inner rooms and enters his privy chamber, his natural body unites to his body politic: here he is dressed and presented to the world, a bulky, new-barbered man scented with rose oil. As rebels run free in the north, and the members break faith with the head, a kind of mutiny or civil war has broken out in the king’s body.
The doctors stop him: ‘Lord Cromwell, you have influence with our sovereign: could you persuade him to rise earlier from table?’
‘Not I,’ he says. A man who is accustomed to hard riding will fatten when he leaves off, and he knows it from his own person. When he was young in the cardinal’s service he would ride forty miles a day, forty the next, forty the day after: many horses but only one Cromwell. These days he is coddled by clerks who chase about at his whim. He says, I am fifty, and even at thirty I was never lean. He does not take his belly, as the king does, as an insult to God’s design, nor dwell on days when he did great exploits in the saddle. After Mass the king sits with Gregory working through the score sheets from old tournaments. Their voices are low and absorbed, their heads together, decoding the notches on the staff: jousts are transcribed like music, the anthems of violent and passionate men. ‘See where he misses.’ Henry’s fingers stab the line. ‘That is not because he is unskilful, but because he is aiming for the head.’
‘It is chancier, sir,’ his son says.
‘But here he aims lower and begins to succeed. Two hits, and on the third he breaks his lance. Atteint, atteint—and then, broken on the body.’
The joust is not his model for public affairs. You don’t want your opponent to see you coming. The last thing you want is a tent and a flag. Mr Wriothesley complains of the time wasted. ‘I see it makes him happy, impressing young Gregory. But as far as business is concerned, not enough is done to justify the royal hour.’
The king flaps the score sheets down. ‘I could have made a living at it, riding through Europe, one tournament to another, if I had not been called to rule.’ His hands knead Gregory’s shoulders: ‘Look how this young master is putting on muscle.’ He ruffles his hair. ‘Daily practice is what I advise. If you cannot get into the tilt yard, still you can wear your armour for an hour. That way, you start to bear the weight as if it were a silk jerkin.’
‘Sir, even on a Sunday?’ Gregory says.
‘Ask your father.’ The king winks. ‘He is over the church, you know. I know him for an unholy fellow, making up accounts on the Sabbath, rattling away on an abacus and taking his pleasure. So why should you not have your sport? There is nothing like the wearing of harness, for any man who wishes to be lean as well as strong. With the heat inside, surplus runs from you like fat from a spit-roast.’
There are those who believe—and perhaps the king is one of them—that the health of the land depends on the health of its prince, and on his beauty besides. If you speak of an ordinary man you might say, ‘He cannot help his face.’ But a king must learn to help it. If he is ugly, so is the commonwealth. If the king is sick, so is his realm. Old men will tell you how the king’s grandfather King Edward grew soft in middle age, his eye always rolling in the direction of any woman at court, wife or maid, under the age of thirty. He lolled on a daybed with supple flesh, while his own brothers plotted against him, and when one brother was dead the other plotted alone: so golden a prince, lucky on the battlefield, blessed by God, was spoiled by sloth and neglect of business, because you cannot have your hand on your ministers when your fingers are creeping up a cunt. Even King Edward’s sons, two likely young sprigs, were pulled out like weeds and their corpses thrown God knows where.
He tells the doctors, ‘You forget the king is a newly married man. A man who wishes to produce strong children cannot do it on a vegetable diet.’
True, the doctors say, but neither can he eat as much as he did when he exercised every day. Not without an imbalance of the humours and congestion in the organs, a sluggish digestion and a fat liver.
Afternoon: he sits with the king in his library, where books are kept in great chests, volumes covered with embroidered velvet or scented leather, emblazoned with the royal arms or the badges of former owners. When our forefathers defeated the French under Great Harry, we shipped their manuscripts home across the sea. They were mirrors for princes, texts that prescribed how to be a king: they were written for kings to read.
‘Great Harry was not only a soldier,’ the king says. ‘He took his harp on campaign. He composed songs, but all of them are lost.’
In the king’s prayer book is portrayed King David, who plays his harp. Turn the page: David studies his psalter—it is an edition, in miniature, of the volume our king now holds. His red beard curled, his gown loose, the King of Israel sits at his leisure, holding in his hand the very book in which he is pictured.
‘Come, Gregory,’ the king says. ‘You are fond of stories of Merlin. My father had many books made about him. Choose and read.’
‘Are you not afraid of him?’ Gregory says. ‘His prophecies?’
‘Not I,’ the king says. ‘Merlin has been killing me these ten years. I have had my bones rotted and my head cankered, and as for London Bridge, I cannot count how many times it has crumbled, and this very castle in which we now sit washed downriver and into the sea. I am inclined now to doubt when I hear his pronouncements.’
‘Wizards are made like other men,’ Gregory says. ‘Offer Merlin an abbey. It could not hurt.’
‘Tell the Master of Augmentations,’ the king says, laughing. ‘I shall like to see Riche’s face.’
He is surprised the king does not burn such books. Merlin is popular in certain quarters, and you can see why he gets so much credit. He foretold a day would come when churches would be flattened and monks forced to marry; where German heathens sat at table with the king, and true noblemen were herded starving from the hall. But of course, Merlin also said that the river Usk would boil, and that bears would hatch out of eggs; that the soil of the future would become so rich that men would leave farm work and spend their days in fornication.
The scholar John Leland, the king’s antiquary, is travelling through the land looking to see what the monks have, that might be good for the king’s own libraries. He himself, on his journeys for Wolsey, would ask to see anything of interest. Often as not, he would meet with stony-eyed exclusion: ‘Sir, I regret that text was lost years ago.’ Or, ‘Ah, no, Master Cromwell, I fear the worm has got it.’
He says, ‘They thought I might steal their prizes for the cardinal.’
‘He was known to be acquisitive,’ the king says.
He looks away. Sometimes the king speaks well of Wolsey. Sometimes not.
The king says, ‘What happened to the cardinal’s books of conjuring?’
‘I have no memory of them, sir.’
‘Perhaps my lord Norfolk took them,’ Gregory says. ‘He took most things.’
The king says, ‘Is it true that Wolsey had the spirit of Oberon bound to him, to serve for a term of years?’
‘I don’t credit such tales, Majesty. They’re only to get money out of you.’
‘I only partly credit them myself,’ Henry says. ‘But Oberon is a very powerful spirit.’ The king stirs, he rubs his leg, he gets to his feet. ‘Walk,’ he says.
Mr Wriothesley falls in with them, and Richard Riche. The king cannot wander about his palace by himself. The yeomen of the guard, who assemble in the watching chamber, are supposed to line his route. Where is the queen? In her own apartments, among the women: but her offence forgiven. ‘She pities the poor,’ the king says. ‘It is a woman’s part. I would not have her otherwise. And she hates all talk of war. She fears for my person. It is largely to soothe her that I have not gone north myself.’
He sees Wriothesley and Riche exchange a glance. Riche says, ‘Your Majesty has never been north, I think? Though what reason to go now, of course—among ingrates who more regard their goblins than their God?’
The king says, ‘A man who has reigned twenty-eight years, not passing a day without the cares of state, should be able to place his faith in his liegemen. Among the northern lords I mistrust Lord Dacre, but not only he. I thought I could count on Lord Darcy, yet even as he prates of his loyalty he complains of his rupture and his stiff joints.’ The king looks down from the oriel window, over the new terrace. ‘Let us hope he can oil himself and go into action, but now he tells me that at Pontefract the garrison is under strength, they have no guns, they cannot feed all who flock there, and the walls are falling down. Why does he tell me this, except to discourage me?’ The rain slashes against the window. ‘And the Earl of Derby—it is known there are malcontents in his train and they hate you, Cromwell—besides, all Stanleys are turncoats, they will watch to see which way the battle goes before they join it. Now Henry Clifford—’
‘Our strength in the border,’ Riche puts in.
The king frowns. ‘His tenants grumble against him even in years of plenty, so will they obey him now?’
‘Clifford is a hard man,’ he says. ‘Even Norfolk says he is a hard man, but we can count on him. As also Lord Talbot with his great train—’
‘Always our mainstay,’ Riche offers. Our?
The king says, ‘Talbot is another ancient man—but yes, loyal to me and mine.’ He stops, grimaces. ‘Norfolk, I suppose, must be permitted to ride north.’
Norfolk’s father was seventy when he sliced up the Scots at Flodden. Our duke has some seven years left, to do anything as famous as that. ‘Norfolk will work hard for your favour,’ he admits. ‘He relishes a battle, even if it is only country folk. He thinks we have enjoyed peace too long.’
‘I tell you what it is, the loyalty of the Howards.’ Henry limps; he puts out a hand to steady himself against the Lord Privy Seal. ‘John Howard, who was grandfather to the Norfolk that is now, was known to declare that if a stock of wood or a standing stone were King of England, he would defend its title—if it were named so by Parliament.’
‘It shows a high regard for the standing of Parliament,’ Richard Riche murmurs.
‘But he fought against my father!’ The king turns on Riche. ‘Do you not comprehend that, you dolt? He took Richard Plantagenet for king.’
Riche draws back into himself so far that he seems to be trying to retract into his ribs, like a man squeezed by Skeffington’s Daughter. He begins his apologies, but he—Lord Cromwell—cuts him off. Young men, and Riche is young enough, do not understand that to this very day, nothing in this kingdom counts so much as how your forefathers behaved on the field at Bosworth.
‘The Howards made a grievous error there,’ Mr Wriothesley says. ‘And it cost them their dukedom.’ He is so keen to distance himself from Riche’s folly that he has passed to the other side of the king and appears to be hanging on his elbow.
‘The present Howard keeps before him that example,’ he says. ‘He would never offend.’
‘Well, he does offend,’ Henry says. ‘And I perceive that you, Riche, do not know what a king is. A king is made by God, not Parliament. Parliament proclaims his title, furbishes his authority—but where in the scriptures does it mention Parliament? Contra, there are numerous mentions of what submission the subject owes to his prince, and of how the powers that be are ordained of God. If these Pilgrims cleaved to true religion as they claim, they would know this. And they would beg pardon on their knees and straightway go home.’
‘And would you pardon them, sir?’ Mr Wriothesley asks.
‘Stand further off, Call-Me,’ the king snaps. ‘I don’t like to be crowded.’
Mr Wriothesley’s mouth drops open. Call-Me? How has this private joke rolled into the public sphere? Henry is displeased; he signals to them to fall behind, and limps on alone, into the darkening afternoon.
‘I perceive your fingers were a-twitch for pen and paper,’ he says to Riche. ‘But he has said it all once, and he will say it again.’
There are things the king has not voiced, yet must suspect: that behind the banner of the Five Wounds, there are other invisible banners, sewn with the emblems of the Courtenays and Poles. Gentlemen of ancient houses have turned out to defend the Tudor—but they must be watched closely, their deeds as well as words. Some captured rebels have freely confessed that they hope the Pope will send another king, Reginald Pole by name, who will wed the Princess Mary, and turn her father Henry out to beg. The Pilgrims claim they crusade for the Virgin in her innocence and purity. But knowingly or not, they serve the pride of Gertrude Courtenay and Margaret Pole—the young woman who would like to be queen of England, the old woman who deems she already is.
‘Sir,’ Richard Riche pulls at his elbow, ‘I have notification—that is, I am required—I am advertised that I could be useful, that I should go up to York, that I should show myself—’
‘Why don’t you do that?’ he says. ‘York might be safer than here.’
Mid-October: at Lincoln Richard Cromwell is now encamped with Fitzwilliam and Francis Bryan. He is called into every council, and gives Fitz credit for it. Other lords would prefer to keep him out, but Fitzwilliam stands our fast friend, he writes: no one may speak ill of Cromwells, in his presence. He writes that Bryan hopes to encounter Aske in single combat: two one-eyed men grappling for glory, as in tales of old. He writes he misses his home and his uncle: ‘Comfort my poor wife.’
He wonders, should he bring Frances under his own roof? He is not short of roofs; she might go to Stepney or Mortlake. If any malcontents should penetrate London, they would attack Austin Friars. God knows what they would expect to find. A great heap of treasure: confiscated chalices winking with gems. Precious relics, such as twigs from the burning bush, and a box of the manna that fell on the Israelites in the desert.
He writes to Richard in his own hand: here we are all well if not contented, Mrs Richard is impatient for your return as am I but the king must be served, temperately, carefully. At idle times, while you are waiting for action to begin, do not let your companions draw you into games of chance. If you refuse they will jeer, look at Cromwell’s nephew, he is not good for the money: but if you take part, they will find some excuse to brand you a cheat. We are agreed Norfolk and his son must join the campaign; but if you come in young Surrey’s path, get out of it, he will work you a mischief if he can. Do not be drawn by any slander to myself. They will say what they must to provoke you, at a time when every man’s weapon is ready in his hand.
He ends each day buried under a weight of dispatches; with every piece of news that comes in, he seems to know less. If Aske were fighting in your own cause, you would call him a robust captain, and godly too, because he directs his ragbag army to pay for what it takes from the country people. But do his soldiers heed him? Or have they run beyond his control? Loyal gentlemen fleeing the north bring their reports. Aske says, hold back: his sergeants say, march. Aske says, don’t ring the bells, his soldiers ring the bells; he says, don’t fire the beacon, and they fire it. His own brothers have deserted his side and galloped for sanctuary. And yet they say his rise was foretold in a prophecy. The north has long been expecting him, a one-eyed messiah. How did he lose his eye? No one knows.
Henry says: ‘Vile blood: what is it, that these rebels cry it down? There have always been mushroom men.’ Grown up overnight, he means. ‘Both my father and my grandfather would agree, a common man can be as good a servant as a duke. Being humble-born, they have no interests of their own—only solicitous to serve their master, from whom they derive all their fortune.’
He says, ‘If my lord of Norfolk were here, he would tell your Majesty that, having no family, such men have no honour. They will do anything, without scruple.’
‘But they have souls to save,’ the king says. ‘So not anything, I do suppose. Did you know Reginald Bray? Bray came from nothing. Worcester grammar school, if I recall. But he was a wise and expert man in my father’s cause. The great lords had to be very pleasant to him, for they feared every word he might drop in the king’s ear.’
Bray must have been dead thirty years, more; how could he have known him? But the calculations of princes run beyond mortal span. He says, ‘I know his resting place, sir.’
Bray is buried here at Windsor, within St George’s, which his munificence helped build. (Though so is John Schorne, a priest who conjured the devil into a boot.) He has seen Bray’s emblem high in the air, his rebus frozen in stone and glass. I should find one at ground level, he thinks, and abase myself on it. Bray took over the king’s finances; he made money for himself by the way. Henry says, ‘The labourer is worthy of his hire. Bray went into battle against the Cornish rebels. He acquitted himself gallantly.’
For a clerk, he thinks. Is the king suggesting that he should put down his pen and pick up a sword? Despite all that has been said?
‘You remember the Cornish,’ Henry says.
He nods. ‘I was a boy then.’
‘My father took us to the Tower. He had faith in that fortress to stand, even if they looted the city.’
It is not just in the north they hate taxes. At the fringes of the kingdom they do not understand England to be one nation, with borders we all must pay to defend. When the Cornish broke out in rebellion they said they would not pay to secure the north against the Scots, for they did not know what a Scot was. They were led by a lawyer, one Thomas Flamank, and a blacksmith they called An Gof: ‘blacksmith’ is what it means, his name tells you what he was. Gathering forces as they rolled up-country, they marched towards London, and before them strode a giant, name of Bolster. Possibly he did not lead them but guarded their rear, for nobody saw him—he was always out in front or just behind.
At the Williams’s house in Mortlake, where he ran errands in exchange for his dinner, they poured scorn on giants, roaring with laughter as they told the story of one of Bolster’s Cornish mates, a sad and lonely giant who played quoits on Sundays with his only friend, a spry lad called Jack. One day the giant patted Jack on his pate, and his fingers went through the bone as if it were piecrust. The giant’s cries made the welkin ring, while Jack’s brains ran down his chin like gravy.
He told his sister Bet, ‘Giants were descended from Cain, who killed his brother. There were hordes of them on the earth before they drowned in Noah’s flood. They were tall, but not so tall their heads came above the water.’
Bet said nothing.
He said, ‘Trojan Brutus fought those that survived, and put them to the sword. He was the mighty man who invented London.’
Bet said nothing again.
‘Bolster?’ he said. ‘Is that really his name? Because that’s ridiculous.’
Bet said, ‘Are you going to tell him that to his face?’
The more nobody saw Bolster, the more the fear of him grew. He was ten foot tall, or twelve foot, with arms like the sails of a windmill and iron-shod feet that could burst a head like a grape. In Putney, their homes stood in the path of the rebels; and he a boy, some twelve or thirteen years old, stood ready to knock hell out of Bolster’s kneecaps.
In that commotion time, Walter turned a shrewd penny, outfitting his friends in third-hand armour, bashing breastplates into shape. Privately he said he feared not, because he knew about the Cornishmen’s ale. It takes twenty-four hours to make, and they brew it wherever they camp. They down it by the pail, creamy brown and fizzing, and it gets you drunk like nothing else. Then it makes you spew all next day.
At Blackheath the rebels were destroyed by the king’s army. Many knights were made on the battlefield that day. An Gof and the lawyer were hanged and quartered, their bloody parts sent back to be displayed where they were born. But Bolster was never hanged. No gallows would be strong enough. The world is wide and he is in it somewhere. Perhaps he lies fathoms deep, breathing through his gills like a fish, till he is ready to swim up to the light and begin his career afresh. A giant is not used to inaction. Nor is my lord Privy Seal. This frustration, this constraint, as the last of the leaves fall and the early frosts begin, takes him back to his early life, before Bolster was thought of, and before he set his foot on the ladder to rise in the world: before he knew there was a ladder: back to the days when other people were in charge of his fate: before he knew there was fate: when he thought there was only the smithy, the brewery, the wharves, the river, and even London seemed distant to him, or, to speak truth, he had no idea of distance: when he was no more than seven years old, and his uncle John and his father settled his destiny between them, and he said scarcely a word.
His uncle John said: ‘I tell you what, brother. Thomas is no use to you yet, he is only underfoot. So why don’t you let me train him up?’
They’re inside the doorway of the brewhouse. The smell blankets him. He comes up to John’s elbow. His father is moving in the dimness, heaving some chests around; he wonders what’s in them. ‘Oh, just stand there, brother!’ Walter says. ‘Just stand there and watch a man break his back!’
John says, ‘Do me courtesy of listening when I speak to you.’
Walter dumps the box he is hauling. ‘What?’
‘Let me take Tom to Lambeth. The kitchen steward’s a good friend to me.’
‘You want to make him into a cook? No lad of mine will be known as Platterface.’
‘He won’t be bound,’ John says. ‘What harm?’
‘I suppose he can make me a posset in my old age. Stew a fowl. All right.’ Walter laughs. He thinks he’ll never be old. He thinks he’ll always have teeth. ‘Mind, Tom, obey your uncle, or you’ll be baked in a pie.’
‘You’ll be minced.’ John slaps him around the head to seal the agreement. Already there’s something solid about him, that inclines people to cuff and slap him, perhaps because it makes a satisfying noise. But as they walk away, John says, ‘You need a skill, Tom. You don’t want to be like your dad, good at nothing but trouble.’
He says, ‘There’s a box under his bed with three padlocks.’
‘Gold, I don’t doubt,’ John says. ‘Where from I don’t like to think. But take him out of his parish, and how would he thrive? They all know him in Putney and none dares cross him. But let him walk abroad without his bully boys, then it’s a different tale.’
Think of that. For the first time, he imagines Walter through the eyes of an indifferent stranger: sees a squat bruiser, unshaven, his belt holding him together. A scoffing, jeering ruffian, looking for a fight; and being Walter, he never looks far. Everybody’s agin him and hoping to do him down, filch what’s his. Filch them first, is Walter’s maxim, and that’s how he thrives. He clip-clops through life to the sound of other people grieving: sniffing out weakness, anybody sad or lost, so he can inflict them.
He says to John, ‘Everybody in Mortlake knows my dad. Everybody in Wimbledon. I’ll get the smithy when he’s dead.’
‘What’s going to kill Walter,’ his uncle asks, ‘unless the hangman? You’ll be a labourer till you’re thirty if you wait on him. I can’t teach you his business, but I can teach you mine. You need a trade you can carry with you. Even in a foreign country folk always want cooks.’
‘I wouldn’t know their dishes,’ he says.
‘A light hand with a sauce, and you’re welcome anywhere.’ John sniffs. ‘I’d like to see Walter make a cream sauce. The bugger would curdle as soon as he looked at it.’
He thinks, my uncle is jealous. My father is a famous fighter, and he’s only good at flouring things.
But he says, my good uncle, I would like to learn your trade, where do we begin?
Mid-month: Lord Clifford is besieged at Carlisle. The Duke of Norfolk is at Ampthill with the king’s forces, and with him Henry Courtenay, the Marquis of Exeter: with the marquis, though the marquis does not know it, are men watching him, on Lord Cromwell’s behalf. Norfolk has got what he wants—a troop of men at his back, the king’s commission in his saddlebag—yet still he grouches in every letter he sends. Mr Wriothesley opens them, and interprets the content to the king.
The rebels are aiming for York and the mayor believes the city is too divided to resist. The rumour is that its archbishop has already fled. Robert Aske has called down the rebels from north Yorkshire to join his host. They say they will restore houses of religion in the territory they capture. Mr Wriothesley says, I told you so. I told you, when the monks go, we should knock the buildings down after them.
He, Thomas Cromwell, goes from Windsor to London, road or river, to and from at the king’s behest—he might as well be with the armies, so uneasy his bed, so spare his diet. Even when he is on the road he feels he is still within the castle, trapped in the royal hour, the royal day. The king is querulous when he is not in his presence—he is still Master Secretary, after all, and everything works through and by him. But the king’s first need is coin. His dishes and chalices must be sacrificed, weighty gold chains signed out of the Jewel House never to return. He has never believed metal should be left to lose its lustre, or weigh down the persons of great men—it should circulate as money and multiply. But, he says to Call-Me, I would like to meet a competent alchemist this fall, or a princess who could spin gold out of straw.
In Windsor the town hugs the castle walls, and what were market stalls in King Edward’s day are dwellings now, dirty infills like dens for dwarves, clustering up to the castle ditch. The streets are packed with tradespeople come to try their luck, see what they can sell to the court, for within the castle’s tight precincts they grow nothing, can’t even stock a carp pond. All day wagons rumble uphill, across the cobbles and through the great gate, so noble folk must edge aside to give carters a path. He hears that sermons have been preached in the town in favour of the Pilgrims. He slips money to a few boys of his choosing so they can stand in line at stalls and get the gossip, and later filter into the Windsor taverns, jostling with the customers of Thameside harlots. Afterwards they seek out a priest, see what kind of confessions he likes to hear, then put it to him bald: are these rebels holy, Father? Should we take their part?
So much travelling in the cold and wet, and he wakes up aching. His dreams are oppressive: he finds himself at a landing stage, the opposite bank out of view. The river widening, nothing but the grey still water stretching away, polished pewter reflecting a silver sky: no bank in view because there is no bank, because the water has become eternity, because his flesh is dissolved in it; because his stories merge, all memories flatten to one.
His uncle John says, mind, young Thomas: if you are going to learn, you can’t go running up and down the riverbank, you have to be where we can find you. Because when Archbishop Morton—Cardinal Morton, he is now—has visitors from Rome, they’re not replete with a dish of split peas, they expect to eat songbirds basted in honey. We can’t say to them, well, Monsignors, unfortunately the boy who catches larks has gone home to Putney, because his father’s entered in a shin-kicking contest, and Tom is holding his coat and taking the bets.
It was not easy to leave Putney. There were matters that called him back; he was a boy, you whistled for him and he came. Men planned a robbery and besought him to go through a window for them, and open up the house.
‘No,’ he said.
‘No?’ said the brigands. ‘Why not?’
‘Because I fear God’s punishment.’
The chief robber said, ‘You should more fear my fist.’ And showed it to him.
Besides, they said, why would God notice a boy like you? Why would he care if you go through Mildred Dyer’s window, she being a widow with a store of money, and none but a lapdog to defend her, a cur we can kick away, or easy break its neck?
He thought, God regards every sparrow that falls. From listening at a sermon, he had this text by heart. God regards Mildred Dyer. God regards her dog Pippin. He said, ‘I disdain you. You are the sort who need strong drink before you dare jump a puddle, and on the day you are hanged my friends will laugh at you while you kick.’
The chief robber deployed his fist then, pinning him against the wall and pounding his head till the others cried, ‘Edwin, he’s not worth it.’
He did not remember the pain, perhaps did not feel it. But he remembered the taint of the man’s breath.
‘Who did that?’ Walter said, when he took his injuries home. ‘All angels help me,’ he said, when he heard the story. ‘Next time someone invites you to a robbery, say no in a civil fashion. Tell them you’ve a job on somewhere else—it’s only common courtesy.’
As he grew up, he grew into caution: to a degree. He sinned, he sinned greatly, but usually he picked his time. He saw a woman forced, and he said and did nothing. He saw a man’s eyes put out of their sockets, because he had witnessed what he should not: Jesu, he’d said, would it not have made more sense to slit his tongue? One day when he was brought up against the frontier of Walter’s schemes—some frontier he was unwilling to cross—he had said, ‘Father, do you not know right from wrong?’
Walter’s face grew dark. But he said in a tone mild in the circumstances, ‘Listen, son, this is what I know: right is what you can get away with, and wrong is what they whip you for. As I’m sure life will instruct you, by and by, if your father’s precept and example can’t get it through your skull.’
The thief Edwin had said, while he sucked his knuckles, ‘Be glad of that, boy, a gift from me. You may go begging for a beating hereafter: Satan himself wouldn’t soil his paws.’
On 16 October the rebels enter York. York is the second city in the realm. England is collapsing in on herself, like a house of straw.
When the news comes he is in London, scraping together ten thousand pounds so Norfolk can pay his troops. A message comes from Wriothesley: the king wants him, wants to see him as soon as humanly possible. Another letter follows, another …
When he arrives at Windsor a knot of councillors surges around him, long-faced. The king is at prayer. In his private closet? No, he is addressing God from a grander place, the chapel of St George’s.
Bishop Sampson says, ‘Cromwell, he waits on you.’
‘But you have told him? That York is lost?’ Only in that moment does it strike him that they might have held back the news for him to break.
But it appears Rafe Sadler has done it: Rafe is with him now. Oxford says, ‘I doubt the king will blame you too much, my lord.’
For the fall of York? How could he be to blame? But someone must be …
Lord Audley says, ‘I doubt even Wolsey could have changed the wind these last weeks.’
No? Wolsey would not have fled York, like the present archbishop. He says, ‘No rebel would have dared to rise within a hundred miles of my lord cardinal. Active force would have met him, if he did.’
To St George’s, then. He pushes through the councillors. ‘Come on, Call- Me.’
Wriothesley says, striding beside him, ‘Death has made the cardinal invincible, sir?’
‘So it appears.’ Though Wolsey never speaks to him now. Since he came back from Shaftesbury he is without company or advice. The cardinal bounces in the clouds, where the Faithful Departed giggle at our miscalculations. The dead are magnified in our eyes, while we to them appear as ants. They look down on us from the mists, like mystic beasts on spires, and they sail above us like flags.
The king is in the chantry chapel, high above the Garter stalls. He climbs, and on the tight spiral of the stair the chambers of his heart squeeze small. From here, he knows, the king looks down on his ancestors, at the murdered King Henry—sixth of that name—in his tomb.
He ducks into the low doorway. The king is kneeling, back rigid, seemingly at prayer. Rafe Sadler is kneeling behind him, as far away as the space will allow. Rafe turns up his face, imploring; as he, Lord Cromwell, passes him, he flips his cap over his eyes.
There is a cushion; it’s better than the bare boards. For some time he kneels in silence, directly behind his monarch.
In Florence, he thinks, I played at calcio. It is a game of many players, more a mêlée than a sport. The young men of family would turn out their stouter servants, twenty or thirty to each team. Mad Englishman, he: his excuse being that, as his Tuscan was not perfect, he did not know the rules.
He can hear the king’s breath, his sigh. Henry knows he is there: he gives himself away by a twitch of the muscles at the back of his neck.
Ten minutes into the game you would be bloodied, the ball itself basted in snot and sand and gore, your breath short, your long bones juddering, your feet stamped to a paste and your hair yanked out in handfuls: but you never noticed or cared, once you got hold of the ball. Forward you charged, ball tucked against you, a whoop of triumph sailing over the rooftops; but when you had run ten paces, some bellowing lunatic would hack you behind the knees.
Henry puts his hand to his nape, like someone who has been brushed by a gnat. His sacred head half-turns; he lifts his gaze, wary. ‘Crumb?’ he says. As if it were the start of a prayer: though one with no particular efficacy.
He waits. The king heaves a deeper sigh: a groan.
Mother of Sorrows, the game hurt when it stopped. Though when you were playing, you never felt a thing.
Henry crosses himself, and begins to struggle to his feet. Would a hand to help him be welcome, or bitten?
‘York? How can York fall?’ When the king turns his face it is dismayed: as if somebody has cut a gash in it, opened his brain to the light.
Rafe, in the shadows, stands behind him.
He scoops up his cushion. It is embroidered gold on crimson: ‘HA HA’, it says. Henricus Rex. Anna Regina.
Rafe takes it from him as if it were hot.
If this were Florence, he thinks, I would boot that cushion over Santa Croce. Her memory with it.
The king says, ‘Tonight I shall dine in the great hall.’
‘Majesty,’ he says.
‘I must appear in great…’ the king falters … ‘glory, you understand me? Where is the Mirror of Naples?’
‘Whitehall, sir.’
He thinks Henry will say, take a guard and fetch it. The king takes no heed of distance or weather. He wants to blaze before his subjects in the great pearl and diamond that was the treasure of France.
‘Whitehall?’ Henry says. ‘Never mind.’ It appears he only has to think of the Mirror to feel glorified. He always says, when the French ask for it back, ‘Tell François my claim to that country is stronger than his. One day I shall ask for more than jewels.’
‘We shall need the trumpeters.’ Henry’s voice is small in the great spaces of the chapel. ‘Rafe, are you lurking there? My duty and my love to the queen’s grace. If she pleases to wear the sleeves with my monogram that Ibgrave sent in June, I shall wear the matching doublet.’
Far below them—in the mirror of time you can see them—the Garter knights weep in their stalls, their dead skulls rattling inside feathered helms. But the king straightens his shoulders, tilts up his chin. Later Rafe will say, ‘You have to admire how he took the news, when York fell. You would have thought someone had given him a thousand pounds, instead of a kick in the teeth.’
By suppertime he is so harassed by messengers that he has to send Rafe to whisper in the king’s ear and beseech pardon for his absence. They say the mayor of York has got the treasure out of the city, but can he keep it safe? The Pilgrims will be able to finance their cause from what remains, fleecing the rich citizens. Within York’s walls are crammed forty parish churches, a dozen great houses of religion untouched by the Court of Augmentations. That the place seethes with papists, he has long known; but where would York be, or any of those great wool towns, if he did not work continually to patch up peace with the Emperor, to keep their ports open, and if he did not represent their cause, persistently, to the merchants of the Hanse? If he met Aske he would ask him, how is it in the interest of the north, to threaten those who can best prosper your people?
He says to Rafe, ‘Lucky the King of Scots has gone to France. If he were at home, he might be mustering to come down on us.’
The word from Paris is that James has not yet married a wife. Instead he is doing a lot of shopping.
Rafe says, ‘James has left his council at home to govern. They have an eye to their opportunity, I suppose. I do not know if they would venture to declare war.’
They don’t have to declare it. At calcio, nobody ever declared war. The result was wreckage, all the same: a field strewn with teeth, and (one had heard of it) gouged eyes. No one was actually stabbed but sometimes, inadvertently, players fell onto each other’s knives.
Letters done. He sands his papers. Tonight I can no more. ‘I’m hungry, Call- Me. Perhaps it is not too late to join our master.’
At the end of the great hall where servants sit and boast, he can see Christophe hard at work. Christophe tells people he has been to Constantinople, where he advised the Sultan. At his palace in the twisting lanes of that metropolis, perfumed fans would agitate the air, and plump women, in their skins as God made them, would lie about on divans, with nothing to do all day but work a curl around their forefinger and wait for Mustafa Cromwell to come home, and call for sherbet and virgins.
But in Windsor the light is low outside, and grouped about the king in their furs, his senior councillors: Audley the Lord Chancellor, John de Vere Earl of Oxford; a bishop or two. At the queen’s right hand, Lady Mary is seated. Mary’s eyes pass over him. No signal, except a faint pursing of the lips. On the queen’s other hand is the Marchioness of Exeter, Gertrude Courtenay. It is her office to hold the queen’s fingerbowl, should she require it, while Lady Mary hands her napkin. Glancing down the hall to Gertrude’s entourage, he sees Bess Darrell, and Bess Darrell sees him.
He approaches the king. About his neck, as deputy for the Mirror of Naples, Henry is wearing a rough-cut diamond the size of a large walnut. His doublet of crimson satin is sewn all over with gold and pearls, picking out the queen’s initial. Jane’s crimson sleeves are stiff with matching letters: H, H, H again.
Without looking at him, Henry stretches out an arm for a bundle of dispatches. The king’s attention is fixed on some fantastical tale being trotted out by—blood of Christ, how did he come here?—Master Sexton the jester.
‘I thought you had forbidden him the court, sir?’
Henry’s smile is wary. ‘True, I boxed his ears. But poor fellow, he has no other way to earn a living. Will Somer is sick. He has a colic. I have recommended oil of bitter almonds. An Italian remedy, I think?’
Sexton skips across the floor, chanting:
‘Will is sick and ill at ease
I am full sorry for Will’s disease.’
The king says, ‘Have you not had your supper? Take your places.’
‘Has he washed his hands?’ Sexton bawls. ‘Go lower, Tom. Which is the table for shearsmen? Which is the table for the blacksmith’s lad? Go lower. Keep walking. Trot on till you get to Putney.’
‘Master Wriothesley,’ the king says, ‘my scribe. Take your seat…’
‘What, Wriothesley?’ Sexton bawls. ‘My inkhorn, my splot, my blotch? Frig him, ladies, and he spurts ink. Tell me, Blotch, where’s your friend Riche? What do they call him, Sir Purse?’
Call-Me turns pink. He takes his place. It can only be moments before the king checks Sexton from such bawdy talk, which is never to his taste, let alone that of his wife and his maiden daughter. The ladies will not understand his crudities, of course. Gregory used to call Riche ‘Purse’, but Gregory was young then—he didn’t know it means a cunt. Unless, of course, he did.
Sexton lurches towards them. ‘What, Purse is among the Pilgrims? We may never see him again, which would not make you cry, would it, Master Blot? No, Blot brooks no rival—he would be glad if the rebels cooked and ate Purse, and spat out what they could not stomach. All know how he betrayed Thomas More. I wonder any gentleman speaks to him.’ He rolls his eyes around the company. ‘I wonder even Cromwell speaks to him.’
There is some incautious sniggering. The king frowns. But Master Sexton bowls on. ‘The commons cry for bread, Majesty. Why not give them Crumb?’
The queen moves a hand to cover her mouth. Her embroidered sleeves flash initials: H, H, H. Lady Mary is looking at the table linen with some attention, as if it needed darning. Henry says, ‘The fellow is impertinent, but you must take it in good part, my lord.’
‘The Pilgrims will crumb you,’ Sexton shouts. ‘They will crumb you till you are crumbed back to flour.’
The king says, ‘Do not answer, it will goad him.’
‘If the Emperor comes you will be crumbed and fried. You will be sizzled like the heretic Tyndale.’
He should heed the king’s word, yet he must speak: ‘We do not know for certain that Tyndale is burned.’
Sexton says, ‘I could smell him from here.’
Beth Darrell is a flitting presence by candlelight, a wraith. He cannot help but belly out her gown with the shape of the child that never was.
‘My lord Privy Seal.’ She considers him. ‘Creeping about the apartments of the ladies, by night.’
‘See me as Master Secretary. In that capacity I get everywhere.’
She laughs. ‘So your friend is at court.’ Mary, she means. ‘She is a dangerous friend to have.’
‘How is that?’ He is playing stupid: feeling out the rumours.
‘She thinks you have offered to make her queen one day. She thinks you have an understanding. Tacit, of course.’
Hardly an offer, he says, indifferent, but she says, ‘Do not disdain the rumour. It may buy you a little credit with the Poles or the Courtenays, and you may need it one day.’
‘Why, do they think the Tudors will go down? Do they say so?’
‘Never in my hearing. But my mistress Gertrude hopes the king will take advice and put the government into the hands of honest men. If abusing Lord Cromwell were treason, you could hang her tomorrow.’
‘I could hang half the peerage. I am glad your marchioness is at court, under our eye. Though I can think of people I would rather look at.’
‘Can you?’ She is teasing him. ‘Meg Douglas?’
‘Oh yes,’ he says. ‘I like her so well I keep her under lock and key. But tell me, does Mary confide in your mistress?’
‘Mary says nothing to anybody. She bides her time.’
Bess’s face raised to his: a sweetly encouraging face, her eyes warm. Does she think he will speak out for Mary’s rights and damn himself? He would not put it past this young woman to hold a double hand in the game. He turns away: ‘Are the Courtenays good to you? They have not reproached you about Wyatt?’
She lays a flat hand on her person. ‘There is no sign Wyatt was ever here. The Courtenays do not mention his name.’
He thinks, they are persons of limited capacity and Wyatt is too hard for them to fathom. Bess says, ‘Verses are written to damn him. They circulate here at court. Because in the spring he stood with you, and not with the Boleyns.’
‘To counterfeit a merry mood
In mourning mind I think it best.
But once in rain I wore a hood
Well were they wet that barehead stood.’
‘Blood,’ she says. ‘The precipitation of our age. They think he walked away and left his friends to die. I wonder where those five gentlemen are now? For that matter, I wonder where Wyatt is.’
‘With the king’s army. I cannot be more exact, we are all like planets driven out of our courses. But I hear he does great deeds with his Kentish men. Does he not write to you?’
‘Of course. But you know Wyatt. He would not put a date or place, he would not like to be pinned to it. He does not say anything usual, like “Commend me to my friends,” or “My heart is your home for ever.”’
‘I am sure it is. Who would not grant you the freehold?’ She darts a smile over her shoulder and melts into the darkness, as fleetly as she came. He rubs his fingers together, as if he had tried to catch at her linen and caught a spider’s web instead.
He has almost gained his own door when another woman steps into his path, a candle in her hand. Jane Rochford is as precise and fresh as if she were going to Matins. ‘Cromwell? Where have you been? She wants to see you.’
‘The queen? At this hour?’
‘The Lady Mary.’ Rochford laughs. ‘She is her father’s daughter. She does not sleep, so why should anyone else?’
Mary wears a furred nightgown of stiff crimson brocade. ‘I hope they are keeping you warm,’ he says. ‘And well-provisioned?’
He had told the household officers, block out the draughts, build up her fires, send in extra fuel: bread, wine and boiled meats to go to her chamber each day at dawn.
She says, ‘The great breakfast is needless now. If you remember, it was so that I did not have to dine in the hall in company, and sit lower than little Eliza. In those days when my title was degraded, and Eliza was styled princess.’
She does not ask him to sit. He would not, anyway. He says, ‘We have worked so much between us that I forget some of our ploys. I must ask you my lady—you have not been approached?’
‘The rebels may use my name, but they have no permission from me.’
Which is to say, yes, I have been approached. And as he moves towards her—he, Lord Cromwell—she does not move, except that with a little hitch she draws her nightgown together, hiding the white of her linen; and at once lets it go, as if she knew the gesture to be ridiculous. He is close enough to touch the cloth of her gown, but of course he does not. ‘You favour that crimson, I perceive, you and the queen both—may I ask, is it from Genoa?’
‘I believe so. The queen sent her brother Edward to Hunsdon, to see what apparel I needed. I said, my father’s favour is clothing enough, but he begged me to ask for whatever I wished. Edward Seymour is a fine gentleman. It is a pity he is a heretic.’
‘Edward is guided by the king, as are we all.’
God forgive me, he thinks, but she is exhausting. And starved of touch, her rank forbids it.
She says, ‘I hear the council is discussing a marriage for me. With the young Duke of Orléans.’
‘The French are discussing it. I’m not sure we are.’
The French will not take her unless Henry makes her his heir. This, of course, he will not do; but could some compromise be reached, a French marriage would detach her once and for all from the Emperor and the Spanish. Therefore, we are talking.
He says, ‘You see yourself with a Spanish husband, very likely.’
She hesitates. ‘The king is such a good father that he would not marry me against my own wishes.’
Answer the question, he thinks. She turns her back on him, as if incidentally. ‘And your own care of me has been so tender that it is like that of a father.’
He can see her face in a glass, only she does not know that. Someone has made her aware that we are linked, if only by rumour. She is warning me off. Well, he thinks, I am warning her. ‘Would you not like to marry an Englishman?’
‘Who?’ The question jumps out at him.
She stares at him through the mirror. Her heart is in her mouth. Let’s leave it there.
A restless supper: a worse grace. He can hear the rain on the leads, its trickle and swirl. Well were they wet that barehead stood … His meal lies heavy, and as he goes to his desk—the last messages have come in from Yorkshire—he finds himself thinking of his spectacular bed: the king has given him a set of covers and bed hangings, purple woven with silver tissue, emblazoned with the royal arms. You are mine asleep or awake, Henry is saying: like a lover. You could keep a troop of horse in the field on what the gift has cost him, but Henry must feel he is worth the expense. He lights another candle, and calls in Christophe to build up the fire. He has used up his court allocation of coals and wood but he says, hang the expense, say it’s for me, and if anybody queries it, just knock them down, will you?
Christophe grins. I fetch Rafe to talk to you? Or someone to sing? But he says, no, no, I must get to this, it won’t wait; but then he rests his head on his hand and perhaps dozes, and he is now here, now there: now lit by the tentative flicker from the hearth, now by the sunlight on the water of the Thames at Lambeth, forty-odd years back: but what is forty years, in the life of a river?
I kept this back for you, Uncle John says. Got to eat it when it’s just warm. Too hot or too cold and you don’t get the beauty of it. A cook has to learn. It can’t always be leftovers.
It is an aromatic custard in a white dish. He saw the gooseberries earlier, tiny bubbles of green glass, sour as a friar on a fast day. For this dish you need fresh hens’ eggs and a pitcher of cream; you need to be a prince of the church to afford the sugar.
His uncle stands over him. The custard quakes in waves of sweetness and spice.
‘Nutmeg,’ he says. ‘Mace. Cumin.’
‘Now taste it.’
‘And rosewater.’
John’s smile is a benediction. ‘Nothing is so green as a summer in England, Thomas. Those who have voyaged yearn for it. They dream of a bowl such as this.’
On the silk road; in the heat of the plains where neither rill nor brook trickles in three days’ march; in the fortified towns of barbarians, where you can cook an egg by cracking it on the stones; in the places at the edge of the map, where the lines blur and the paper frays: by Mother Mary, says the traveller, by the maidenhead of St Agatha, I wish I were in Lambeth and had a dish of gooseberries and a spoon.
He shakes his head. This dish lacks some final flourish … He pictures himself, forty years on, standing where John stands now. He is the master cook, he wears velvet: he never goes near a flour bag, nor flying hot oil: papers in hand, he issues his orders, and at his behest a boy who looks very like himself tosses slivers of almonds in a latten pan; then he spoons them into the cream, freckling it.
And then he might, if he had made an elderflower cordial, venture to add a drop or two.
The boy he can see has his own curly head, his skinned knuckles, his feet cold on the stone-flagged floor. He wears a patched jerkin of sad colour. Beneath his clothes are the prints of his father’s fingers: bruises reversing nature, turning from the autumn black-purple of the elderberry to the pale yellow-white of the flowers.
All his flesh is dappled with these shadows. Walter can’t help it, John says, he lashes out. Our own father may God acquit him was the same.
If you go out on a morning in late June, after the dew has burned off, you can pick the finest elderberries from the top of the bushes, employing a hooked stick or giant to help you. When you have carried them home, you spill them by handfuls onto a scrubbed tabletop. Breathing in their honeyed scent, you sift them for the best-formed blossoms, your fingertips gentle; then you paint each petal with white of egg. If you dip them in sugar, which as the servant of a rich man you can afford to do, you can keep them a year. On a cheerless November day, when the idea of summer has dropped out of the world, you can lay the crystallised petals on the surface of a cake, each one a five-pointed star: to enchant the eye of a lady, or to tempt the jaded palate of a king.
19 October, the city of Hull capitulates to the rebels. In Doncaster, mayor and chief citizens are compelled to take the Pilgrim oath. In the chapel at Windsor, the dead knights in their Garter stalls bow over their shame in an agony of colic that no oil of almonds will ease: inside their helms they moan, earls of Lancaster and earls of March, Bohuns and Beauchamps, Mowbrays and Veres, Nevilles and Percys, Cliffords and Talbots and Fitzalans and Howards, and that great servant of the state, Reginald Bray himself. There are more dead than living; why can they not fight?
When evening comes a blue light fades in the north windows, and the river is sucked into the darkness, as if into a universal sea. The south windows are shuttered, the courts below fall quiet, and the watch is changed at the foot of the king’s privy stair. The tapers are brought in, and mirrored sconces redirect a shivering light; the king’s private rooms, painted and gilded, shine like a jewel box.
The king says, ‘I remember my father’s passing … Bishop Fox came to me at Evensong: “The king your father is dead: God save your Majesty.” I said, at what hour did his soul depart? And Fox never answered. I guessed by that my father had lain untended, cooling in his death sweat, while his councillors plotted at their leisure. For two whole days after that, his ministers pretended he was still alive.’
He thinks, they meant well. They wanted everything ready for a smooth accession.
‘Think how they had to dissimulate,’ the king says, ‘walking around Greenwich with unaltered countenance. I could not have done it myself, being a natural man, incapable of deception. You see how, my lord, by the time my councillors proclaimed me, they had already started lying to me. As soon as you are king, nobody tells you the truth.’
‘I might…’ he says.
‘You might mollify it,’ Henry says. ‘Or tell what truths you think I can bear. Though I will not say, “My lord, I want truth unadorned.” I will not make that claim. I have my share of human vanity.’
He is afraid Gregory will laugh.
Henry says, ‘I wanted two months of my eighteenth birthday, so they named my grandmother regent. But then on Midsummer Day, Katherine and I were crowned together.’
The songs tonight are Spanish: a boy sings about contests with the Moors, airs less martial than melancholy. Messages are brought to the Moorish king: God keep your Majesty, here is bad news. Las neuvas que, rey, sabras / no son neuvas de alegria … The notation is strange to him, the voice part inked in red.
Henry says, ‘You know when you see a little child placed on a chair, its legs dangling? You smile and pity the child, do you not? Imagine a young man placed on a throne … you feel as if your feet are in the air, like that…’
He sees Gregory smile. He thinks of Helen, before she was Rafe’s wife, bringing her little children to Austin Friars and setting them on a bench, their legs thrust straight out before them.
The king says, ‘My father said that the surest sign that Heaven favoured his reign was the birth of a prince so soon after his marriage to my sainted mother. In January they were wed, and in September they had Arthur in the cradle. It is no sin, you know, to go to bed once you are betrothed, or if it is a sin, it can easily be absolved. They were blessed with a numerous family after. I remember us together at Eltham, gathered in the great hall, the day Erasmus came to see us.’
‘May God rest him,’ Gregory says. He hopes Erasmus will not rise, to write more books.
The king’s hand moves to cross himself; his jewels catch the light. ‘I would be eight years old, I think, a bonny child and a toward wit. I sat under the canopy of estate, and to my right my sister Margaret, being about ten years old, already betrothed to Scotland. My sister Mary on my other hand, her hair white like angels’ hair. And Edmund still a babe, he was held in some great lady’s arms I suppose. I had another sister, Elizabeth, three years old when she died, I have no memory of her, but they said she was as lovely as Mary, and a great pity she died, for she could have been married thereafter, with advantage to our polity. Edmund himself lived not long after. And my sister Mary is dead now. And Arthur. There is only myself left. And Margaret, far beyond the border.’
It is hard to know whether the king is congratulating himself, or commiserating with himself. His lips are stained by many cups of a strong and sweet malvasia; he blots with his napkin, eyes distant. ‘The burden of kingship,’ he says, ‘no man can imagine it. All my life, to be a prince: to be observed to be a prince; all eyes to be set on me; to be an exemplar of virtue, of discretion, of excellence in learning; to have a mind young and vigorous yet as wise as Solomon; to take pleasure in what others have designed for my pleasure, or be thought ungrateful; to discipline all my appetites, to unmake myself as a man in order to make myself as a king; to waste not a minute lest I be seen to waste it; for idleness, no excuses; always alert to prove, always to show, that I am worthy of the place God appointed me … When I was a young man I suppose I showed the calf of my leg to an ambassador and said, “There, has your French king a calf as good as that?” And my words were reported, and all Europe laughed at me, a vain idle boy, and no doubt people laugh still. But being young I asked myself, if God had formed François better than me, which prince did He favour most?’
Thomas More had said once, can a king be your friend? He thinks, the first time I came into Henry’s presence, it was like the Fox and the Lion. I trembled at the sight. But the second time, I crept a bit nearer and had a good look. And what did I see? I saw his solitude. And like Fox to Lion, I stepped right up and parleyed with him, and never looked back.
The king says, ‘I have got no good of my sister Margaret or her marriage with the Scot. She has been a trouble and an expense all her life. And see now her daughter going the same way, intriguing with Tom Truth.’
He has been hoping the king will be good to Meg Douglas, and let her move from the Tower to some easier custody; now, he sees, is not the time to broach it.
‘They are saying in the north that you want to marry her.’
Gregory is caught unawares: ‘What?’
‘You need not deny it,’ the king says. ‘I tell everyone, Cromwell would not presume. Not even in his dreams.’
He feels obliged to state, ‘Nor do I.’
The king says, ‘Do you know, there are some who claim the old Scots king did not die at Flodden? They believe he escaped the battlefield and took ship to become a pilgrim in the Holy Land. He has been seen in Jerusalem.’
‘Only in fantasy,’ he says. ‘Did not Lord Dacre, who knew him, inspect his naked remains? And my lord of Norfolk will tell you, you could put your fist through the holes in his surcoat where the blades had pierced him.’
Henry says, ‘I was winning battles in France at the time, I cannot know. But I wonder if princes do die, as common men die. I feel my father watches what I do.’
‘Then surely, sir, he sees your difficulties, and admires your resolution?’
‘How can I know that? If the dead can see us, be sure they do not like the world to change from what they knew. Nor do they like their power disrespected. Norfolk’s father took credit for Flodden, but in Durham they credit St Cuthbert with the victory. They march behind his banners now.’
The king holds up a hand to the lute player: ‘Thank you, leave us.’ The boy stuffs his music back into his budget and goes out backwards. The king picks up his own lute. Oh shining moon light me all the night … Ay luna tan bella, light me to the sierra. He says, ‘I loved Katherine. Did you know that? Despite all that ensued.’
He thinks, if he forgets the words I cannot assist him here. Though it is a fair bet that the night will cloud up at some point and hide the moon. The ladies look down from the towers of the Alhambra. The horsemen curvet below, on white mounts with gilded hooves, pennants streaming from their lances. All the troupe, Moors and Christians both, file together into the antique darkness, a blur of gold against the night: cities are besieged and cities fall, warriors burn with the fires of love and are consumed.
Henry sings: I am the dark girl, the rose without thorn. He says, ‘Katherine claimed she loved me. So why did she try to destroy me?’
He makes no answer. He has mastered silence, but to better effect than More.
The king’s eyes rest on him. ‘The children who died in her womb, I think they did not want to be born, they did not care to live in this peevish world. But where did they go? They say there is no salvation for the unbaptised. Some think God would not be so cruel. And God is not as cruel as man. God would not sew a man in a cow’s hide, and set dogs on him.’
His servant John Bellowe is alive, it transpires. Richard Cromwell has seen him, and patched him up and set him to work again. It is true he was taken prisoner, roughly used, and set in the stocks at Louth. But he is not blinded or mauled by dogs. He hopes no one explains to Bellowe the death they thought he had died. Hearing such a tale, a man might lose his confidence in his fellow man.
The old king’s advisers, he thinks, knew trade and the law. Bray died in his bed. But his protégés, Empson and Dudley, were arrested before they knew the old king’s soul had passed. They were haled out of their houses and dragged through the April dawn along Candlewick Street and Eastcheap and so to prison. They were charged with the crime of massing troops in the capital, plotting to seize the person of the young Henry. It was an unlikely charge. They fell because the people hated them. They were the old king’s bad angels, but God he knows, they kept him in funds.
There are moments when as he goes about his duties he feels a fierce exultation—he, Cromwell, Lord Privy Seal. But he would never admit it to any person: they would lecture him about the mutability of fortune. Look at his life: does he need a reminder? He says to Rafe, vanity compels us to pretend we plan every step. But when the cardinal came down I stood before the lords of England like a naked child waiting for the whip. I sent you oiling to Norfolk, ‘Can Master Cromwell have a seat in the Parliament house, he will do much good for your lordship?’ Christ, yes, Rafe says, I thought he would have kicked me to Ipswich.
There is a time to be silent. There is a time to talk for your life. He saw Henry’s need and he filled it, but you must never let a prince know he needs you; he does not like to think he has incurred a debt to a subject. Like the old king’s ministers, he labours day and night for his prince’s increase. The Italian Niccolò says that when a prince has such a servant, he should treat him with respect and kindness, advance him to honours and promote his fortune. Perhaps when the book is put into English our prince will read it.
In Siena you may see a fresco, where Good Government is set out on the wall, so that everyone can see what peace looks like. Peace is a woman: she is a blonde; her hair is braided, and her head leans upon her hand, which is turned so that you see the tender white skin of her inner arm. Her dress is of a fabric so fine that, when it falls away from her breasts, it skims the length of her body and drifts into graceful pleats and folds, into an area of mystery between her relaxed, parted legs. Her feet are bare: they look intelligent, like hands.
On the opposite wall, Bad Government has taken Peace by the hair. She is panicked, screaming, jerked to her knees.
He remembers the great jars in Florence, their cool curve under his hand; they seemed to him to be speaking to each other, edging closer so their sides touched and chimed. Oil and wine, in jars with sounding depths; bread and wine, God’s body; the torn manchet loaves at the tables of the rich, fine white bread while the poor eat barley, rye. At Windsor in the king’s chamber a gentleman brings in more tapers; the light flutters across the ceiling like an influx of cherubim. The king consults the songbook. He sings that he burns without surcease: a mountain girl, unloved, a maid from Estremadura.
He and Rafe exchange glances. Rafe, who knows the Spanish tongue well, looks as baffled as he is. Henry says, ‘Crumb, have you talked to my daughter? You know the French have offered for her?’
‘I find their approaches tepid. Not to mention offensive. They assume your Majesty will not have a son, when all likelihood is that you will.’
‘Write to Gardiner,’ Henry says. ‘He can tell François we are not interested.’ He bends his head over his lute again. ‘Though perhaps we should get Mary wed before her bloom fades entirely. She is not like her mother. Katherine was a beautiful creature, at her age.’
Call-Me says, ‘The French must have a spy among the queen’s women. I swear they know when she has her courses.’
‘That will be Jane Rochford,’ he says.
‘You know that, sir?’
‘No,’ Rafe says. ‘But Lord Cromwell is a gambling man.’
Their supper tonight was lamprey pies and whiting and Suffolk cheese, and pheasants killed with their own hawks. You rise from table and it is as if you have been invited to a feast by a magician in a tale. You think you have been in the king’s chamber two hours but when you step outside, seven centuries have passed.
As October enters its third week, Lord Darcy surrenders Pontefract Castle to the rebels. The distinguished men who have sheltered there—among them Sir William Gascoigne, Sir Robert Constable, and Edmund Lee, Archbishop of York—are compelled to take the Pilgrim oath.
He has channels open, across the Narrow Sea. Among the French councillors are those who urge the Pope to seize the moment and publish his bull of excommunication. Once it is public, all Henry’s subjects will be loosed to join the rebellion. He says to Rafe, ‘Put the word out to the gentlemen in the privy chamber, and let them spread it among their friends—if I find any have written to Rome, I shall take it as proof of treason without further enquiry.’ He says, ‘Our hope now is that the Bishop of Rome will not act because he cannot understand what is happening in the north country. How should he? We hardly know ourselves. And if Pole is advising him, he can scarcely know Pontefract from the kingdom of Cockaigne.’
The king sends Lancaster Herald to Pontefract with a proclamation. Robert Aske refuses to let him read out his message, but civilly offers him safe conduct out of the castle and town. He and his Pilgrims will stay true to their cause, they say, and will march on London.
Norfolk has proceeded from his home at Kenninghall to Cambridge, from Cambridge to the north. He claims he is grieved to the heart at the actions of Lord Darcy, who by blood or marriage is related to the greatest families of the north, and who appears to have declared for the Pilgrims. Surely there is a misunderstanding? Space must be left around this magnate, so later he can claim he has been misunderstood.
Darcy sets himself up as the bluff old soldier, but his nature is double. The cardinal was good to him; Darcy betrayed the cardinal, drawing up the indictment that fed the king’s anger. He swears great oaths that he is true, but these three years past he has been talking to Chapuys, enquiring as to the chances of troops from the Emperor.
Garlanded by praise for his fidelity from the Lord Privy Seal, the aged Lord Talbot is ordered to march towards Doncaster. Now the fightback has begun: though the prescription is to avoid any actual fighting, swerve engagement where possible. What is essential is to secure the bridges and the main highways, pen the Pilgrims north of Trent. At Windsor he sits by the king, working out what terms will entice the foe. It is for him, the vile Cromwell, to make the king’s language emollient. Offer what you must, to induce the bands to disperse. Corrupt them from within. Set gentleman against servant, rustic against monk. They have no common bond but their banner, and what is it? Painted cloth.
Norfolk writes he neither eats nor sleeps, except in the saddle. For an hour he gets his head down and he is roused three times, each time by fools bringing in messages that contradict each other. ‘Take in good part whatever promises I shall make unto the rebels … for surely I shall observe no part thereof…’
I will, the duke indicates, lie for England. Send me approved lies by the next courier. Send them by your fastest horse.
Near Doncaster, the Pilgrims halt their army. The duke halts his puny forces. His heart is broken, he complains, at having to talk to these traitors, instead of plough them under; all the same, he meets their leaders, listens to their complaints. Norfolk gives a safe-conduct to two Pilgrims, gentlemen, to take a petition to the king.
Truce, then. Temporary, conditional … But I believe, he tells his boys, Aske’s nerve has failed. The heart within his breast, which is no soldier’s heart, quakes at the bloodshed in prospect. Once they sit to talk, the Pilgrims lose the impulsion that has brought them so far, their confidence in their own crude strength. The winds of November will bluster through their tents; where they camp, the district will grow hostile; food will grow scarce for man and horse; their water pails will ice over in the night; boots will crack: good order will break down, disease break out. Our pockets are deeper, after all, our arguments more baffling, and we have better guns. We will temporise, and winter will come, and it will be over.
Some hours before the king retires, the groom of the bedchamber calls in four yeomen of the bedchamber, and four yeomen from the Wardrobe of the Beds bring in the king’s sheets. The straw mattress that forms the first layer of his bedding is pricked all over with a dagger, before a cover is stretched across it; while they prick and stretch, the yeomen pray for the king, to come safe through the rigours of the night ahead. When the canvas is taut, one of them seats himself on the bedframe, topples backwards most reverently, draws up his unshod feet, and rolls the width of the bed; pauses, and rolls back. If the gentlemen are satisfied there is nothing sharp or noxious beneath, the feather beds are laid down and pummelled all over: you hear the steady thud of fist on down. All eight yeomen, moving in step, stretch taut the sheets and blankets, and as they tuck in each corner, they make the sign of the cross. The fur coverlet follows, a soft swish and slither; then the curtains are drawn around the bed, and a page sits down to guard it.
So the king’s long day closes. If he decides to go in to the queen, then a procession escorts him to her door in his night robes. During daylight hours, he is so bejewelled that it hurts to look at him; he is the sun. But when he strips off his nightgown stiffly pearled, he is a phantom in white linen, and beneath his shroud his skin. To breed kings in a line of kings, he must become a naked man, and do what every pauper does, and every dog. Outside the door his gentlemen wait till he is finished. They try not to think of the maidenly queen, her blushes and sighs, and the king, his grunts of pleasure, his sweat while he ruts. Let us pray for his good success. He must fertilise the whole nation. If he is impotent, every Englishman falters, and foreigners will come by night and cuckold us.
When the king returns to his chamber, they bring a ewer of warm water, his toothpowder, his night-bonnet. In the glass he sees himself for the last time today, and glimpses the young prince he was, bowing out: king of hearts and Defender of the Faith. And in the place where he stood, a bloated man in middle age: ‘Oh Lord, I am working hard in the field, and the field of my labours is myself.’
Gregory says, ‘Father, when the king sent me to look for Merlin books, I lifted up the lid of a chest, and what did I see? I saw three volumes, on their binding the badge of the falcon, and the letters “AB”. I ask myself, does the king know they are there?’
He puts his finger to his lips.
Gregory says, ‘I think it might be like Cranmer’s wife. He knows and does not know. All of us can do this. But kings in higher degree.’
They are going to bed themselves; but he has one last mission. ‘Kitchens,’ he says.
‘You are still hungry?’ His son looks incredulous.
On the stairs he meets Rafe, with papers in his hand and tomorrow’s agenda swimming in his eyes. ‘You wish you were at home with Helen,’ he says.
Rafe pinches the bridge of his nose, blinks as if to dispel sleep. ‘What about you, master—another tryst with a lady?’
‘No, but I have a billet doux. Norfolk writes every hour.’
Rafe says, ‘The king says tonight, if it will hold off the rebels, Norfolk can promise Jane will be crowned in York. It would be to the city’s profit, so they will be keen, the king thinks. And if Norfolk is forced to it, he may offer a parliament in the north.’
‘They want to push me off my patch. They believe, get Cromwell outside London and his power will falter.’
Rafe says, ‘I don’t think the king wants to go to York any more than you do. But every week Norfolk gains by promises is a week nearer winter.’
He wonders why rebels would disperse on a promise. Himself, he would want performance.
Rafe yawns. ‘Call-Me has listed the names of all gentlemen who have been sworn by the Pilgrims. Did you know Lord Latimer is among them? Perhaps the king will hang him, and you can marry Kate Parr. In furtherance of your vow.’
‘Shame on you!’ he says. ‘When you know I am pledged to the Lady Mary, and to Margaret Douglas. I swear I will not marry below royal degree.’
Outside the king’s room the nightwatch is set; but his gentlemen, as they leave him, place his sword by his bed, with a lighted candle. In the last instance, a king must defend himself.
At Windsor there has never been enough space for the kitchens, so they are always throwing up some lean-to in the courts around, and such temporary arrangements have been subsiding and leaking fumes since Adam was a lad. He wants to know if they have damped their fires and cleaned their pans, and see it with his own eyes: no point saving your king from rebels if he is burned up by grease from a loyal turnspit. He swoops in on odd nights to catch them out—just as, on odd days without warning, he arrives at the Tower Mint and weighs their gold coins.
A mist is rising; he rubs his hands against the cold. He knows these back-courts; in all the king’s houses he knows them, the forgotten yards and unpatrolled snickets. In a corner where a wall-torch burns, he sees the jester Sexton alone in a pool of light, scuffling a deerskin football against a wall. ‘Sexton? Why are you abroad?’
Sexton scoops up the ball. ‘No curfew in Patchtown.’
‘You have no business in the kitchens.’
Sexton huddles the ball against his chest. ‘You never know where you’ll find a joke, do you?’
He lunges, knocks the ball out of the man’s grasp, tosses it up and catches it. ‘Your head, Patch.’ A slap of his palm sends it over the wall. He hears a yelp from the darkness; some stranger has had a shock.
Returning, he sees there is a guard set outside his door. The man says, good night and God bless you. The shapes of other men, armed, occupy each recess.
Christophe is sitting up for him. His spaniel is snoring; the marmoset is huddled close to the embers, chattering to himself. When he first brought the creature in, the king had said, ‘Beware, Lord Cromwell, my father had a little monkey that got hold of one of his books of memoranda, and tore it to shreds with his nails and teeth. They pieced the fragments together, but no one could read the result. And so it falls out that today there are gentlemen in luxury, who would have been beggars if my father had sent them their tax bills, and others snug in their parlours who would have been clapped in a strait prison, if the monkey had not altered their fate.’
‘Gregory is abed already,’ Christophe yawns, then absently kisses his cheek: ‘Do not sit up writing, sir.’
Christophe rolls towards his pallet, pulling off his jerkin, scratching himself as he goes. Alone, he—Lord Cromwell—takes the knife from under his shirt, and sets it down. If some north country ogre burst up the stair, would he defend his son, or his son defend him? As the king says, Gregory promises brawn and sinew, the keen level eye of the sportsman, the set jaw of a man accustomed to the weight of a helm. But still like a child he whispers in the dark: ‘The king would see Anne’s books if he pleased. Kings can see through stone walls, and hear remarks passed in the reign of Uther Pendragon. They feel more than common men—as the spider feels the finger before the finger touches it. A king is more like an animal in certain regards, but do not say I said so, it might be ill-taken.’
His head hits the pillow. ‘Might it?’ he says. ‘Well, perhaps you should err on the side of caution. Men have lost their heads for less.’
You think of the prince as living on an exalted plane, finer and higher than other men. But perhaps Gregory has a point: is a prince even human? If you add him up, does the total make a man? He is made of shards and broken fragments of the past, of prophecies and of the dreams of his ancestral line. The tides of history break inside him, their current threatens to carry him away. His blood is not his own, but ancient blood. His dreams are not his own, but the dreams of all England: the dark forest, deserted heath; the stir in the leaves, the dragon’s footprint; the hand breaking the waters of a lake. His forefathers interrupt his sleep to castigate, to warn, to shake their heads in mute disappointment. At a prince’s coronation, God transfigures him, his human faults falling away, his human capacities increased; but that burst of light has to last him. That instant’s transfusion of grace must sustain him for thirty years, forty years, for the rest of his mortal life.
He lies sleepless: Baron Cromwell, Lord Privy Seal, his mind ranging across country over the dales and rivers to where the factious in their encampments stir in their sleep and curse his name. It ranges west, far west, beyond the river Tamar, to where the sons of Cornishmen cold-sweat and heave, their ale foaming through their blood, and where Bolster in his sea cave blows giant bubbles in the midnight deeps, and dreams of swimming up for air; of planting his giant feet on hill and dale, fording the rivers in spate and demolishing the bridges with his heels; of marching to London, to net the ministers of the king, and snap their necks, and grind them up like spices to sprinkle on his porridge.
A giant cannot imagine what it is like to be a man of ordinary height. He cannot enter into their feelings. He never learns to bargain, or deceive: why would he, when he gets his way simply by cracking his knuckles?
When you are a child you think you have to kill the giant, but as you grow up you think different. Suppose you meet him by chance one day: you about your common business, picking up sticks or inspecting your rabbit traps, and he taking the air at the entrance to his cave, or toiling on a mountainside to uproot great oaks. Giants are lonely; they don’t know any other giants. Sometimes they want a boy like Jack to amuse them, to run errands and teach them songs.
Conquer your awe then, grab your chance. If you know how to talk to a giant it works like a spell. The monster becomes your creature. He thinks you serve him, but in fact you serve yourself.
He is restless—he, Lord Cromwell. He gets out of bed. Opens the shutter. Rain. He shields a candle flame with his hand. His head bobs against the ceiling. But he is not the giant—he is sprightly Jack. You leave your home and head east, you cross the sea, you think Bolster is behind you, but he is ahead. Wherever you arrive, he has arrived first. It’s here at Windsor, the swollen Thames surging under your walls, the water gurgling in downspouts and ditches—it’s here, after all the years, you find your confluence.
In his spare moments he is studying to improve his Greek. Old Bishop Fisher was in his seventies when he began the language, and he is not to be bested by a dead prelate. In a year or two, he wishes to be able to join the divines in their subtle dissection of each point of translation. This week he is reading a book of letters written by the philosophers and soldiers of those ancient times; though you wonder Alexander the Great had time for letters. Our king does not care to write his own—his writing seems to turn back on itself, so after long labour he makes no progress. Instead he corrects the manuscripts of others, or makes marginal notes of a startling nature. Probably the great Macedonian was the same—no doubt he laid aside his lyre and murmured the gist of his message, and a slave inscribed it, the Thomas Wriothesley of his day: bowing in a tent on a day of still heat, the perfume of frankincense masking the reek of elephants on the move.
Long ago in Venice he bought this book, trusting sometime he would have leisure for study. It is from the Aldus workshop, with his dolphin mark: clean, though one page marred by a thumbprint from its first owner. Sometimes he wonders who he was, and why he would part with such a work. Perhaps he is dead and his heirs sold his book, thumbprint and all. Or perhaps he lost interest in the ancient world and turned his mind back to business; tomorrow morning he will be strolling to the piazza with a basket and a street-child to carry it, shopping for olives and pumpkins, pine-nuts and garlic.
When he was an infant, Thomas was afraid of the river: of high tide as it crept around his ankles. He feared it would burst its banks and widen like the sky above us—he had no other way of thinking of it, for he had never seen the sea. He thought the river should be walled off to keep the streets safe, or banks built, to allow men to walk dry-shod above it and view its rising. Imagine then when he came to Venice. The child stirred inside him, crying, ‘Look, look what it’s done! I told you so!’
In Venice he saw, by torchlight, the whole of Heaven painted, and high above the canal a woman’s face brooding in the space between planets. He went back in daylight to view it better, and saw the world painted on a wall, with scaly landmasses and blue oceans; forests where deer sprang from coverts, where nymphs with the heads of birds sang in the trees. He saw a rider richly dressed riding into the distance, his horse’s shoes turned back to the onlooker; the hoof prints are impressed in memory, while the rider fades into an avenue of fallen columns, diminishing to a dot and vanishing from view.
Sometimes Henry says to him, ‘Still at the antique letters, Lord Cromwell? What did you learn today?’
He says, ‘I learned that ars longa, vita brevis: I learned how to say it in Greek.’
‘That is Hippocrates,’ Henry says. ‘He tells us, life is short and our task so great that we will die before we can…’
The king breaks off. It is an offence for his subjects to speculate about his death or predict it, but it is not an offence for him to speak of it himself; yet he looks chary, as if he thinks it should be. ‘“Life is short and art is long, the opportunity sudden and fleeting: experiment dangerous, judgement difficult.” I think I have the sense of it.’
He bows. ‘I am the better instructed, sir.’
Daily, daily, one must practise the courtier’s art, and nightly, the art of governance: and never get it right. Chaucer says it in our own English tongue. ‘The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.’
Just before 5 a.m. on Monday, 13 November, the merchant Robert Packington, a member of Parliament, leaves his house in the City of London to attend early Mass. A thick mist blankets the streets around Cheapside, and bells are ringing from all the parishes nearby. As Packington crosses towards the church of St Thomas of Acon, he falls to the ground. Some day-labourers, gathered on Soper’s Lane waiting for hire, will claim to have heard a boom, a blast, a crack, or a soft detonation like a giant’s fist punching a cushion.
Other churchgoers are close behind. They sprint towards the fallen man, shouting, and the labourers shout too, and the noise brings the neighbours into the street, lanterns in their hands, nightcaps on their heads, faces gaping, blankets thrown over their shoulders. By the time they reach Packington he is dead. Looming out of the mist, a woman screams, ‘Help! Murder!’ Men run for the watch.
A crowd gathers. Packington is recognised: he is well-known in the Mercers’ Company and one of our chief citizens. A surgeon arrives, and identifies the wound as a gunshot wound. No one saw the assailant.
Before seven o’clock he, Lord Cromwell, is under siege at Austin Friars. I can tell you nothing, he says, shouldering through the crowd of guildsmen; I just want witnesses. Where did the attacker come from? In what direction go? And how, in so thick a mist, did he pick out Packington? Because we suppose Packington was his target—you do not crack at random at good men going to Mass.
‘Fetch Stephen Vaughan,’ he says. He has brought his trusted friend over, to keep an eye on the Mint, and he is the man for this business, as for all business requiring sternness and a quick eye; and he has known Packington for years. The coroner comes down with his clerks. The news is broken to the dead man’s brothers. The Lord Mayor puts up a reward for information. Packington’s friends add to it. Meanwhile the labourers have carried the body back to the dead man’s house, and someone has paid them to scrub the blood away. Packington cannot have known he was shot. The surgeon says he would have felt nothing, unless the sensation of flying as West Cheap came up to meet him. He would have been dead before he could say a Pater Noster.
No one saw a strange man in the street. No one saw fire in the murk—as it might be, the match-flare for an arquebus. No one was seen carrying a parcel or wrapping, that could have disguised an arquebus. It seems possible a pistol was employed, that a man could carry in his coat and fire with one hand; moreover, a wheel-lock device, which needs no flare. There are few such weapons in London. Some countries have banned them, but that does not weigh with felons. If the pistol is still with its owner, it convicts him. If it was hidden, it will soon be found. Unless, of course, it’s at the bottom of the river: in which case he is not just a whoreson, but a whoreson with a rich paymaster, to toss such a weapon away.
Packington was a gospeller, he was a Bible man, these many years he has travelled between here and Flanders, not only on cloth business but on the business of scripture; he carried Testaments home, when it was death to do it. ‘He saw Tyndale just before—’ a mercer tells him, and he holds up a palm: ‘I cannot hear what you are telling me. If you met Tyndale yourself I must not know.’ I am your brother in Christ, he thinks, but I am also the king’s servant.
By noon he, the Lord Privy Seal, has visited Packington’s widow, a daughter of the Skinners’ Company. Rob had two stepchildren with her, and five of his own from his first marriage; the city wants to know who will make decisions for them. Chief Justice Baldwin, father of Robert’s first wife, steps forward as their guardian. ‘Guard yourself, Cromwell,’ the judge tells him. ‘I doubt not this killer has stalked you and you have never seen him.’
‘What remedy?’ he says.
‘Body armour?’ Baldwin says.
He has worn it before, in times of civic excitement, under his court robes. It is hot and as the day wears on it becomes a hoop around the ribs and a band tightening the heart. It is the same feeling you get when you are standing before the king, agenda in your hand, twenty items on it and every one crucial—and the king decides to talk about the medicinal properties of lilies. You think you might choke; you feel the ache of being bound to your desk while your nephew rides east, while Wyatt rides north, while Norfolk in some distant tent makes the fate of the commonwealth. And now he is told he is not safe in his own streets—not in his own house, not in his own bed, where Walter stands at the bedpost, sneering at him and fingering the king’s purple and silver curtains.
It is no distance from Austin Friars to where Packington fell. He sits down in the parlour of the woman who cried ‘Murder!’ He listens to her recitation of her morning, from first opening an eye to the moment she ran into the street. But it is clear she saw nothing: except in a dream, she says, two or three nights back, where she saw the city on fire. Outside a restless crowd mutters and gossips on the spot: as if the gunman might come back and do it again, so they can witness. The labourers from Soper’s Lane have changed their story. They now remember a tall man wrapped in a cloak, clutching something under it, and incanting to himself as he crossed the road.
Judge Baldwin is unstrung by the morning’s events. ‘Tall man in a cloak? How does that aid us? We did not think it was a naked dwarf did the deed.’
‘But Lord Cromwell,’ the men plead, ‘he looked Italian.’
‘How does an Italian look, in a thick fog?’
They shuffle their feet. He gives them some coins anyway, for showing willing. ‘You’re too soft,’ Baldwin says, but he says, have mercy, Baldwin, they are only boys, and they carried the corpse—in acting as good citizens, they lost their earnings for the day.
‘Listen, Cromwell. You don’t get a good name among the lowly by sharing their concerns and handing out coin. You get their respect by overlooking them, as if you did not understand their sort, and your own belly had never been empty.’
‘I could not so belie myself.’
‘I’m not telling you what to do. I’m telling you how it is.’
Vaughan says, ‘Do not advise my lord how to be lordly. A great man is openhanded.’
The labourers follow them, encouraged to more suggestions: perhaps the miscreant was a Yorkshireman? ‘We would walk in the procession for the obsequy, sirs, if we got black gowns and fourpence. Pity he was felled on his way into church, and not his way out, for he might have flown straight to paradise and be looking down on us now.’
There is no Purgatory for Packington. He will rest quiet till, at the end of time, he takes a final boat to meet his God. A pity to have survived so many sea crossings, and Thomas More’s persecutions, and the simmering fury of the London clergy, only to come to grief outside your own front door. There is no time to mourn, though the dead man has been his friend these many years. By ten o’clock the mist has dispersed, a pale sun shining from a clear sky. By the Angelus bell it is grey again, but for an hour the air is sprinkled with flakes of gold, as if Heaven has thrown some lustre on dead Packington. Funeral in two days, the family are told, three at most. Father Robert Barnes to preach. It’s what the dead man would have wanted.
It’s a miscalculation. Barnes’s sermon is so inflammatory that he has no choice but to take him into custody. Better in my hands, he says, than in the Bishop of London’s prison. The city has not forgot the case of Richard Hunne. It may be twenty-five years, or nearly that, but the shame is still fresh. This godly merchant, shut up in the Lollards’ Tower, was found hanged: never was there such a hanging, with blood on the flags and blood on the walls. The authorities claimed Hunne had killed himself, in despair at his own heresies. The stool on which he was supposed to have balanced was well beyond reach of his feet.
At Windsor he stands at a casement with Henry, watching the rain. The wind moans in the chimney. The room seems drained of light, as if each window were a device for sucking it out and dribbling it feebly into the day outside.
The king says, ‘Brighter? In the west? Do you think?’
‘Not really.’
Henry sighs. ‘The eye of faith, it must be.’
It occurs to him that he has answered absently, as if to a child or a member of his own household. Henry is fretful, his mind hopping here and there, and when he is in this humour it is best to keep your head low, like a birdcatcher. ‘Do you know what I liked best this summer?’ the king says. He corrects himself: ‘I mean the summer before? I liked Wolf Hall. Once in a while every prince wishes he could lay aside his duties, and live for a year as a private gentleman. Because a gentleman bides content; he dances in the great barn decked with garlands, he sees the harvest home and knows every harvester by name.’
He says nothing. He has the boy Rob in his service, down in Wiltshire reporting on who comes and goes. Not that he suspects the Seymours, but it is no harm to have a source. The king says, ‘I was innocent in those days. I did not understand the Boleyns and their treason. But once I did understand it, and cleared them out of the court, I thought everything would be better. Yet here I am, one summer passed and one winter passing, my son Fitzroy is dead, I have bastardised both my daughters, I have no heir and, as far as I understand, no hope of one. My subjects are in rebellion, my coffers are empty, and my cradle empty too. So tell me, Thomas, how is this better? How am I better off than this time last year? Last year, my subjects were not shot down in the street.’
Still he says nothing. We must trust the gale of self-pity will blow itself out, and presently it does. Henry straightens up. ‘There are thirty thousand loyal men advancing on the town.’ Pontefract, he means. ‘Fear not, my lord. It will soon be back in our hands.’
Henry puts a hand on his shoulder. In that anointed palm there is vertu. Once consecrated, a king can heal. So why does he not feel healed?
As they bow themselves out Mr Wriothesley says, ‘You were at a loss there, I think. You did not utter, sir.’
He says, ‘Leave the king long enough, and he will start to cheer himself up. You must not crowd him, Call-Me. Did he not tell you so?’
When he goes to the Tower to see Barnes, it is without the body armour: it will stop a dagger, but it would not have saved Packington, and why would it save him? No breastplate but Jesus, and Thomas Avery as clerk. It is another foggy day, and it has not lifted by afternoon: rain just holding off, but the air as damp as if the afternoon had been rubbed with snails.
Barnes is at his books, but at the sound of the key he jumps up in alarm: a volume skitters away from him, he tries to catch it, picks it up from the floor and comes upright with his face red.
‘Are they looking after you?’
Barnes falls back to his stool. ‘Every time I hear footsteps in the passage, my heart…’ He taps the table, a broken rhythm. He sees Lord Cromwell is not alone: ‘Who is this?’
‘A good Christian. So be at your ease.’
‘Ease?’ Barnes laughs.
Avery says, ‘This custody is for your protection.’
‘You think it is I who needs protection? What about Cromwell here? Perhaps we should all take each other into custody?’
‘As soon as my lord has the city quiet, you will be free.’
Barnes is himself again, tidying the papers before him. ‘Most men would not believe you. But your master said the same when he locked up Wyatt—you will soon be free. And he kept his word. Though why he would extend himself for such a saucy fellow, I cannot imagine. Wyatt is hardly a promoter of God’s cause.’
‘But he is no papist,’ Avery says. ‘He saw their manners in Italy.’
‘The Pope will unleash his terror now,’ Barnes says. ‘This is only the beginning. Where is that ingrate Pole? Or have you lost sight of him?’
‘Still in Rome. They say Farnese lodges him above his own chamber, and means to make him a cardinal.’
‘He should refuse,’ Barnes says.
‘Did anyone ever refuse to be made a cardinal?’
Barnes says, ‘I thought you would have worked him some mischief weeks back, when he was in Siena. If Thomas More can reach out his hand to strike at Tyndale, being himself dead, then I think that you, being a quick and vigorous man, should be able to strike down Reginald.’
He says, ‘I like my life to be full of interest, Father Barnes. Nothing about killing interests me. And Reynold’s heart was not always cankered.’
As soon as he unravels the conspiracies of such people—unknotting them with a casual hand, and deliberately looking the other way—they insist on entangling themselves again, and whistling and shouting till they get his attention. Margaret Pole, the renegade’s mother, is in her castle at Warblington: too near the coast for his comfort. He imagines her in a tower with a mirror, signalling to boats at sea, which land and discharge the enemy. If it takes just one man to shoot dead a member of Parliament, it takes just one to shoot dead a king; his heart can burst like a common heart. The spot where Packington died is five minutes from the gate of Margaret Pole’s town house; for all we know, the killer issued from behind her wall.
Barnes says, ‘I hear that Henry put on a bold face with the Pilgrims’ delegates. But that in private, he is very much afraid.’
In truth, it was all he could do to stop Henry apologising to the envoys, who came to Windsor and will travel back under safe-conduct. The king declared to them that, contrary to their belief, he had as many noble advisers now as at the beginning of his reign: he offered to name them, earl by earl, baron by baron, so the north country men could count up for themselves. That is not the way forward, he had thought. But at the king’s command, he withdrew and left the field clear for his sovereign to exercise his charm.
He says to Barnes, ‘The king believes his subjects are loyal for love of him. He is not by nature inclined to believe they conspire.’
‘But you are training him to believe it?’
‘Only a fool sees plots where there are none. Any crime may begin in impulse—a rash man, an angry man, a fool the worse for drink. But an impulse will not sustain rebellion. Nor can anyone rebel alone. It needs forethought. It needs confederacy. By the nature of the thing, there is conspiracy.’
‘Then Henry must learn to help his good nature,’ Barnes says. ‘Unless you teach him to deploy it towards our German friends. Or the Swiss pastors. Thomas, all their goodwill is wasting away. They are tired of talks without result. Every chance of alliance is there, if we strike agreement on doctrine. But without a helping hand, England will go down.’
Picture Albion: a lonely ship on the ocean, the feet of her crew perpetually damp. The wind adverse, the storm blowing, the ports closed against her by chains stretched across the harbour mouths. The ignorant and fantastical people of the north say Henry is the Mouldwarp, the king that was and the king to come. He is a thousand years old, a rough and scaly man, chill like a brute from the sea. His subjects drive him out, and he drowns in his own tidal waters. When you think of him, fear touches you in the pit of the stomach; it is an old fear, a dragon fear; it is from childhood. He says to Avery, ‘Would you leave us? It is for—’
‘My own safety. I know.’ Avery bows; pulls the door behind him as he goes.
‘A good young man,’ he says to Barnes. ‘I trust him with my life, but some things he should not hear.’
‘Things about our dread sovereign,’ Barnes says. ‘Do you dread him? I do. As much for what he will not do, as what he might. For his hesitations, which ruin us.’
‘I think I make an advance. When I was first in his service he thought of our Zürich friends as no more than blasphemers who eat sausage in Lent. And Luther, he believed he was the son of a demon, who foams at the mouth when Mass is said. But what you must remember about the king—he was brought up to heed priests and to ask forgiveness for everything he does. You may kick out the confessors and tell him he is justified, but he still has a priest in the head.’
‘He must be enraged with you,’ Barnes says bluntly.
‘Yes, though he tries to disguise it. He is angry that he has to defend me for my vile blood. But he cannot cast me off. Or it will seem as if he has allowed rebels to dictate to him.’
‘That is poor security. To think you hold office at their pleasure.’
‘It’s all I have, Rob.’ He gets up, stretches. ‘I am going to see Tom Truth now.’
‘Oh yes,’ Barnes says, ‘the fornicator. What I hear is, he makes extravagant promises to any keepers who will bring him to Margaret Douglas and leave him there an hour. But the keepers laugh at him. They don’t trust his money.’
‘I ought to get myself locked up,’ he says, ‘Then I might learn a thing or two.’
‘Don’t say it.’ Barnes touches his crucifix. ‘Shall I bless you?’
‘Oh,’ he says, ‘don’t put yourself out.’
He bursts out laughing: he feels light, no plate armour, no chain links, only the knife under his shirt. He has removed Margaret Douglas to the convent at Sion, put her under the care of the abbess. But perhaps her lover does not know that.
His old friend Martin is waiting to escort him. ‘Lord Thomas sets up for a poet, Martin. What do you think?’
‘Not one-tenth of Mr Wyatt’s wit. Nor his application to the page.’
‘You are becoming acquainted with the highest in the land.’
‘Amongst whom I count yourself,’ Martin says reverently. ‘Though I trust it shall be many a day before I see you here.’
‘Why not trust it will be never?’ Avery says.
Martin is startled. ‘I meant no ill-will. I am ever grateful to his lordship.’
Thomas Avery disburses the customary coins, for Lord Cromwell’s godchild.
Tom Truth, unshaven for two days and unprepared for visitors, doesn’t know whether to spit at him or kneel to him. It has perplexed better men. ‘Sit down,’ he tells him. Avery looks into his portfolio and passes him a paper. ‘From Lady Margaret. May I read?’
‘And tho that I be banished him fro’
His speech, his sight and company,
Yet will I, in spite of his foe,
Him love, and keep my fantasy.’
Tom Truth lurches at him. He straightens his arm and fends him off.
‘Give me that!’ Truth comes at him again. He grips a handful of the lover’s jacket and dumps him down on a stool.
‘Do what they will, and do their worst,
For all they do is vanity,
For asunder my heart shall burst,
Surer than change my fantasy.’
He passes the paper back to Avery. ‘By her “foe”, do you think she means me? I hope not, considering I saved her life. She told me she was done with you, my lord, but it seems not.’
Lord Thomas jumps up. He is ready for him. Again he puts him down. ‘Wait—I have also a verse from you to her.’
‘Thus fare ye well, my wordly treasure,
Desiring God that, of his grace,
To send in time his will and pleasure,
And shortly to get us out of this place.’
He raises an eyebrow. ‘Are you going somewhere?’
Truth is winded. That was a hard dunt in the belly.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘let us say you simply wanted a rhyme.’
‘The king should release me.’ Truth rearranges himself, his crumpled person. ‘As matters stand in the north, he needs every man.’
‘Every man he can trust.’
‘The Yorkshiremen have you on the run. Their abbots will curse you.’
‘Curses with me have none effect, because I give them no credit. They may curse till they combust.’
Truth says, ‘My brother Norfolk will speak for me to the king.’
‘I think the duke has forgot you. He is busy with the rebels. Not fighting. Bargaining.’
‘Is he?’ Truth looks mortified.
‘We are outnumbered in the field. He has no choice but to give way.’
‘He will not keep promises to low men,’ Truth says. ‘He will not be bound. No more will the king be bound to you, Cromwell. The harder you try to bind him by your deeds, the more he will detest you. I pity you, for there is no way forward for you. He will hate you for your successes as much as your failures.’
Truth has done some thinking, while he has been locked away. He says, ‘I make sure that my successes are the king’s, while my failures are my own.’
‘But you cannot do without the Howards,’ Tom Truth says. ‘You cannot rule without noble blood. And my brother Norfolk would rather fight in an honourable contest—’
He interrupts him: ‘Honour is a luxury, when someone is trying in earnest to kill you. Your brother knows that. As for you, your bad verse will choke you. I need not lift a finger. There are some prisoners I forbid to have paper. I might forbid you. For your own good, of course.’
He gets up. Avery steps out of his way. At the door a spirit jumps up and intercepts him: George Boleyn, arms gripping him, head heavy on his shoulder, tears seeping into his linen and leaving a residual salt damp that lasts till he can change his shirt.
By the first week of December, any sympathy for the rebels—sympathy which he has retained, for their ignorance—has melted away. Their communications from the peace talks are vomitous torrents of insult and threat. The commanders are obliged to exclude Richard Cromwell from the sessions, as the rebels will not sit down with him. All Cromwells, they declare, should be killed or banished. Parliament has no authority to dissolve abbeys—and it is not a real parliament anyway, because it is packed with the king’s sycophants and elbow-hangers.
All this—and yet they expect a general pardon. They will get it, because their numbers are so great, even though they do not spare the king himself, reminding him that a prince who rules without virtue can be deposed, and they do not find any virtue in his adherence to Cromwell. They mention Edward II, Richard II: kings murdered by their own subjects, because they kept favourites, persons of high ambition and low morals. To compare Lord Cromwell, as they do, to Piers Gaveston … when their jibes are read out, certain councillors bite their lips, others turn their faces away. Because you would not feel it safe to laugh, if you had seen the king’s white face.
Richard Riche says privately, perhaps it is an argument why the king should show himself to his subjects in the north. They would soon perceive he is not the sort of man who keeps a catamite. And that, even if he were, he would not so use the Lord Privy Seal.
He says, it is not for any unnatural vice that the people hated Gaveston: it was because he was base-born, and the king made him an earl. It was because the king made him rich, and he went in silks. But then, he was not English-born: that weighed too, with the ignorant.
Do not mock Ricardo Riche. At least, not to his face. He has stood up well to the hatred directed at him in recent weeks. He understands that there are sins that governors may, perhaps must, commit. The commandments for a prince are not the same as those that govern his subjects. He must lie for his country’s good. We do not need a translation from the Italian, to understand that.
The rebels call him, Lord Cromwell, a Lollard. It is a term almost antique, though when he was young, men and women were burned for it. He hears a woman’s voice in the air, on a breeze blown from his childhood: ‘A Loller, that’s one who says the God on the altar is a piece of bread.’
He is small; his belly is empty; he is far from home. Motherly, she takes his hand as they are jostled in the crowd: ‘Stick by me, sweetheart.’ She bats at the men in front of them, their solid wall of backs, and they part for her, saying, ‘Sister, watch out, you’ll have that child trampled!’
‘Let us through,’ she says, ‘he’s come a long way. Show him how the filthy creature dies, the enemy of God, so he gets a good view and remembers it when he is a man grown.’
Some memories from his childhood he can entertain. John in his kitchen, even Walter in his forge, all accompanied by the smell of burning. But when a memory like this rises up—and in truth there is no other like this—he slaps it down like a man killing a mole with a shovel.
The king tells his council—savouring the moment—‘I mean to invite our chief Pilgrim to join us for Christmas.’
Aske? There are gasps of surprise—simulated, as Lord Cromwell has taken care to prepare the councillors. After all, it’s his idea.
‘It is Aske who has chief credit with the rebels,’ the king says. ‘I shall probe his heart and stomach. And he will see that I am a monarch both generous and just.’
The only danger—and we cannot get around it—is that Aske will also see that Henry is not the puissant warrior of ten years ago, and he will carry word back to Yorkshire. The king wishes to be known as Henry, Mirror of Justice. But perhaps he will be known as Henry the Bad Leg.
Still: the game is worth the candle, and there is nothing to lose from sport with the chief Pilgrim. In our forefathers’ time, the rebel Jack Cade had a good run before he was quartered, and his fractions sent back to his shire. The king will dandle Aske like an infant. Large presents, large promises: a gold chain and a crimson jacket. He will overawe him: trust the king for that. A man’s dealings with Henry are a measure of him. They are a mirror to his weaknesses and vanities. You believe you are a man of ready address, you have rehearsed the encounter in your mind, but such is the overwhelming effect of his presence that you are overcome by holy fear and not able to utter a word.
‘What shall I do, sir?’ he says. ‘I should not meet Aske.’
‘Keep the feast with your own people.’ The king adds: ‘Be at your Stepney house. Then if I want you, you can get to Whitehall in an hour.’
He, the Lord Privy Seal, instructs Bishop Gardiner in France to quash the rumours that are rolling abroad. It is not true that Henry is besieged in Windsor Castle. Nor that he, or any Cromwell, has been stabbed to death in London on Chancery Lane. On the contrary, Cromwells are looking forward to the feast. Richard returns from the north; he comes with the plaudits of his senior commanders, Suffolk and Fitzwilliam.
By mid-month the rebel armies are dissolving themselves. Aske is to come to court under safe-conduct. News comes that the King of Scotland has compacted for his match with the French king’s daughter; he and Madeleine will be married at Notre Dame on New Year’s Day. The match will see hearty accord between Scotland and France, which is much to our disadvantage. ‘What can I do but wish him joy?’ the king says. He dictates a letter, waving aside offers to phrase it for him. ‘Having certain knowledge … your determination and conclusion for marriage … daughter of our dearest brother and perpetual ally the French king … et cetera, et cetera … congratulate with you in the same … desire Almighty God to send you issue and fruit thereof…’ the king’s voice drips disdain, ‘that may be to your satisfaction and to the weal, utility, and comfort of your realm.’
‘Bravo, sir,’ Wriothesley says. ‘A wonderful powerful phrasing.’
The king says, ‘James has already nine bastards that I know of.’
Edward Seymour: ‘Majesty, I think he shall have no issue by Madeleine. I hear she is dying.’
‘Then why would Scotland want her?’
No one answers. Perhaps to have a daughter, any daughter, of so great a king. And to get a hundred thousand crowns, which is more money than James has seen in his life. The king says, ‘We will see how she likes the voyage to Caledonia, and the rough manners when she gets there.’ But his voice yearns for her: ‘They say she is beautiful…’
‘James must have wooed her with jewels,’ he says, ‘because he cannot speak the simplest word of French. All that shopping was not for nothing.’
‘So does Madeleine speak Scots?’ Henry says. ‘That seems hardly possible. Would you not want to talk to your wife? Have some companionship with her? Still, he will not need her instruction in the bedchamber. He seems to know his business there.’
At Stepney, hedgerow berries are humble jewels, bright as beads of blood. The walls are hung with pine boughs, and the great wreaths of vines take two men to carry and hang; they were woven in autumn, when the branches would still flex. Blossoms from the drying rooms are bundled and gilded and ribboned, and as the weather grows dry and sharp, the panelled rooms fill at dawn and sunset with washes of blush-coloured light. He has been waiting for a clear day to see the apple trees pruned, and he goes out with his gardeners. ‘Do not venture on the ladders, sir. Do you stand back, and watch the shape as we cut.’
The middle of the tree we call the crown. We take out any shoots that are frictious against each other, those that are growing backwards, inwards, any way they shouldn’t. We thin the new shoots and as we cut we are aiming for the shape of a goblet. When the balance is right, we clip the shoots, cutting back to an outward-facing bud. By three in the afternoon, though sweat is running in channels inside our jerkins, our gloved hands are stiff as clods and our voices in the air are faint, like birdsong in a distant paradise. We say, all done lads, and we get under cover and warm our hands around hot spiced ale. We have come through queasy days, his gardeners say. Please God all our builders and our cooks will be back with us for the feast, and Mr Richard in his glory.
We raise a cup to the warriors, picking their way south through the frightened shires. Then we sing a song, and cross ourselves, and pray for the apple trees. Indoors, we unlock the room called Christmas, with its costumes for mermen and magi and talking animals. We fit together the spikes of the great star that hangs in the hall.
What survives from this year past? Rafe’s garden at midsummer, the lusty cries of the child Thomas issuing from an open window; Helen’s tender face. The ambassador in his tower at Canonbury, fading into twilight. Night falling on the rock of Windsor Castle, as on a mountain slope.
In back alleys not yards from where the martyr Packington died, sailors offer nutmegs stolen from their ships’ holds at three times the November price—which is already a duke’s ransom. To show seasonal goodwill, a party of London rascals have set on members of the French embassy as they are enjoying a Christmas drink at the Cock and Keys in Fleet Street. They chase them, shouting ‘Down with the French dogs!’ The day ends with one dead Frenchman and another in a grave condition from stab wounds.
Gifts by the cartload roll up to his door: fat swans, partridges, peasants. And Ambassador Chapuys, chuckling at the misfortunes of the French. He sits him down over a quiet supper and evades his close questions about the north. They are not really questions; because of his links with Darcy and other slippery souls, Eustache probably has better information than we do.
‘Well,’ the ambassador says, ‘the writers of the almanacs said this would be a great year for secrets.’
He grunts. ‘Greater for expenses.’
‘Henry must eat his Christmas dinner from pewter. All his plate is melted down to coin.’
He shrugs. ‘We have a great host to pay off. We must have turned out fifty thousand, at short notice.’
Chapuys does not believe the king had fifty thousand men, but all the same he cannot help working out the expenditure.
‘I tell you, Eustache,’ he says, ‘you are much deceived about Englishmen, their temper. You talk to the wrong people. The Poles and the Courtenays don’t know what is happening, I know what is happening. The Emperor boasts of what he will do here when his troops come. But Charles will do naught, because it is a bad precedent when a prince helps another prince’s subjects to rebel. It gives his own people the idea they might do the same.’
‘Go on thinking that,’ Chapuys says, ‘if you find it comfortable.’
They eat in contemplative silence: spiced venison, teal, partridges, and oranges thin-sliced like sunbursts. A shaft of light makes its way over the fallen snow, picking a path to the year ahead. The court rides through the city of Westminster and east to Greenwich, a moving trail of darkness against the frost. The Thames is a long glimmer of ice: a road in a frozen desert, a trail into our future, a highway for our God.
When the ambassador leaves him, it is three in the afternoon and feels much later. He sits down in gathering dusk to work through his day books, compile his memoranda for the first council meetings of the new year. Christophe brings him wine in a goblet of Venetian glass. He says, ‘This belonged to the cardinal. I bought it from the Duke of Norfolk.’
He buys the cardinal’s property when he can, wherever he sees it, hangings and plate and books from his library: the new owners feel so guilty at the sight of him that they do not refuse his offer, which he pitches insultingly low. If things are not for sale he gets them back somehow. Look at this tapestry, under which he now sits, which depicts the Queen of Sheba in bold colours and gilt thread, her mild face like the face of a woman he once knew. Wolsey owned this hanging; the king took it when Wolsey fell: one day, in an overflow of generosity, the king gave it to him. Or, as he thinks of it, gave it back.
‘Sometimes,’ he says to Christophe, ‘I am like you, I imagine other lives I might have had.’ If Henry has a princely double, perhaps he has one as well, leading a safer life in Constantinople. Compared to Henry, a sultan is placid.
‘I could have been a Frenchman like you,’ he tells Christophe. ‘I could have been a Lowlander.’
Christophe glances at the wall. ‘If you had married that woven lady.’ He does not mean the Queen of Sheba: that would be more outrageous than marrying the Princess Mary. He means Anselma, the Antwerp widow whose likeness has got into the weave. Maybe it is not so surprising to find her there. A master must have models. Perhaps the man who made the design passed her one day, running with a message to the quayside, or glimpsed her as they left Mass together at the church of Onze-Lieve-Vrouwe: and thought, who is that supple widow, with that slab of an English on her arm?
He says to Christophe, ‘Will you bring The Book Called Henry? I think I will write down my thoughts. And more lights, if you will.’
‘Do not miss your supper,’ Christophe says. He sees how his household are trying to take care of him. Fussing over me, he says, as if you were my godparents.
He takes up his pen. God bless the work.
You cannot anticipate or fully know the king. Thomas More did not grasp this. This is why I am alive and he is dead.
This is not a book you could take to the printer. It must be for the eyes of the few.
Your enemies will continually belie you, and fix you with the blame for the malfeasance of others or for simple misfortune. Save your breath: any exculpation is too late. Do not be weakened by regret, and do not let regret weaken the king. Sometimes a king must act on imperfect information, and afterwards sanctify his impulses.
He thinks, suppose I fell ill, and were like to die? What would I do with the book then?
Do not be afraid to ask for what you want. Ask and it shall be granted: but first cost it out. The king wishes to appear magnanimous at the least expense to himself. This is a reasonable position for a ruler to adopt.
I could leave it to Gregory or my nephew or to Rafe Sadler. But I will not leave it to Ricardo or Call-Me. I doubt if there is much I can teach them. Or much they can learn.
The king believes that even if he were not king, he would still be a great man. This is because God likes him.
He needs to be liked and he needs to be right. But above all he needs to be listened to, with very close attention.
Never enter a contest of wills with the king.
Do not flatter him. Instead, give him something he can take credit for.
Ask him questions to which you know the answers. Do not ask him the other sort of question.
This year has been what every year is: one long royal day, from the king’s first stirring to his slumber. Yet it has drawn to one singular moment, as glass concentrates the rays of the sun. Time has distilled to a single heartbeat, to the instant of the cut: the Frenchman with his sword, his perfectly calibrated motion. Then the women holding up their hands, their fingers stiff with loathing; bending their backs, lugging the corpse away, tears glistening on their cheeks.
In the old stories, a great mirror is set before the palace of the king. It is as wide as the sky, and three thousand warriors guard it. It is reached by five-and-twenty steps of porphyry and serpentine. Even by night they guard it, when it reflects nothing but a kingdom blanketed in darkness, and perhaps the faint etched line of a star.
Keep your eyes clear. Remember he is a king first and a man second. This is where Anne went wrong. She began to think he was only a man.
He looks up. The room is empty, except for those who do not count. At such moments the phantom Wolsey would walk in, and peer over his shoulder, and tell him what to write, large white hands with their glinting rings heavy on his shoulders.
Sometimes he needs to imagine how it would have been, if the Cornish had come to Putney, bellowing and drooling and trampling everything in their path. Sion Madoc’s dad had told him, ‘They’ll take a child like you and roast him on a spit.’ He had laughed and said, ‘I’ll spit their arses.’ In his black heart he wished for them, he wanted to hear their tread. Hear it, and you don’t have to imagine it. Let the face of their giant crest the rise; or just see the crown of his head, and then you don’t have to think about him any more, you don’t have to picture him, you know the worst: walk with him one red mile, as he tears apart the neighbours and tosses their limbs into ditches.
And what then? Either he kills you, or you are one of those left, picking up remnants of Putney and gathering it into baskets.
Do not turn your back on the king. This is not just a matter of protocol.
He is about to close the book, but he dips his pen, adds a final line:
Try and keep cheerful.