Henry looks at Cranmer as if to say, it’s your turn now: I admit my fault, so give me absolution. The archbishop looks harrowed; he does not know what Henry will say next, or if he can trust himself to respond. This is not a night for which Cambridge ever trained him. ‘You were not remiss,’ he tells the king. He darts a questioning look, like a long needle, at him, Cromwell. ‘In these matters, surely the accusation should not come before the evidence.’
‘You must bear in mind,’ he says to Cranmer – for he is bland and easy and full of phrases – ‘you must bear in mind that not I but the whole council examined the gentlemen who now stand accused. And the council called you in, laid the matter before you, and you did not demur. As you have said yourself, my lord archbishop, we would not have gone so far in the matter without grave consideration.’
‘When I look back,’ Henry says, ‘so much falls into place. I was misled and betrayed. So many friends lost, friends and good servants, lost, alienated, exiled from court. And worse…I think of Wolsey. The woman I called my wife practised against him with all her ingenuity, with every weapon of slyness and rancour.’
Which wife would that be? Both Katherine and Anne worked against the cardinal. ‘I do not know why I have been so crossed,’ Henry says. ‘But does not Augustine call marriage “a mortal and slavish garment”?’
‘Chrysostom,’ Cranmer murmurs.
‘But let that pass,’ he, Cromwell, says hastily. ‘If this marriage is dissolved, Majesty, Parliament will petition you to marry again.’
‘I dare say it will. How may a man do his duty, to both his realm and to God? We sin even in the very act of generation. We must have offspring, and kings especially must, and yet we are warned against lust even in marriage, and some authorities say, do they not, that to love your wife immoderately is a kind of adultery?’
‘Jerome,’ Cranmer whispers: as if he would just as soon disown the saint. ‘But there are many other teachings that are more comfortable, and that praise the married state.’
‘Roses snatched from the thorns,’ he says. ‘The church does not offer much comfort to the married man, though Paul says we should love our wives. It is hard, Majesty, not to think marriage is sinful inherently, since the celibates have spent many centuries saying that they are better than we are. But they are not better. Repetition of false teachings does not make them true. You agree, Cranmer?’
Just kill me now, the archbishop’s face says. Against all the laws of king and church, he is a married man; he married in Germany when he was among the reformers, he keeps Frau Grete secretly, he hides her in his country houses. Does Henry know? He must know. Will Henry say? No, because he is intent on his own plight. ‘Now I cannot see why I ever wanted her,’ the king says. ‘That is why I think she has practised on me with charms and enchantments. She claims she loves me. Katherine claimed she loved me. They say love, and mean the opposite. I believe Anne has tried to undermine me at every turn. She was always unnatural. Think how she would taunt her uncle, my lord of Norfolk. Think how she would scorn her father. She would presume to censure my own conduct, and press on me advice in matters well beyond her understanding, and give me such words as no poor man would willingly hear from his wife.’
Cranmer says, ‘She was bold, it is true. She knew it for a fault and would try to bridle herself.’
‘Now she shall be bridled, by God.’ Henry’s tone is ferocious; but the next moment he has modulated it, to the plaintive accents of the victim. He opens his walnut writing box. ‘Do you see this little book?’ It is not really a book, or not yet, just a collection of loose leaves, tied together; there is no title page, but a sheet black with Henry’s own laboured hand. ‘It is a book in the making. I have written it. It is a play. It is a tragedy. It is my own case.’ He offers it.
He says, ‘Keep it sir, till we have more leisure to do justice to it.’
‘But you ought to know,’ the king insists. ‘Her nature. How ill she has behaved to me, when I gave her everything. All men should know and be warned about what women are. Their appetites are unbounded. I believe she has committed adultery with a hundred men.’
Henry looks, for a moment, like a hunted creature: hounded by women’s desire, dragged down and shredded. ‘But her brother?’ Cranmer says. He turns away. He will not look at the king. ‘Is it likely?’
‘I doubt she could resist him,’ Henry says. ‘Why spare? Why not drink the cup to the filthy dregs? And while she was indulging her own desires, she was killing mine. When I would approach her, only to do my duty, she would give me such a look as would daunt any man. I know now why she did so. She wanted to be fresh for her lovers.’
The king sits. He begins to talk, to ramble. Anne took him by the hand, these ten years ago and more. She led him into the forest, and at the sylvan edge, where the broad light of day splinters and filters into green, he left his good judgement, his innocence. She drew him on all day, till he was trembling and exhausted, but he could not stop even to catch his breath, he could not go back, he had lost the path. All day he chased her, until the light faded, and he followed her by the light of torches: and then she turned on him, and stifled the torches, and left him alone in the dark.
The door opens softly: he looks up, and it is Rafe, where once it would have been Weston, perhaps. ‘Majesty, my lord of Richmond is here to say good night. May he come in?’
Henry breaks off. ‘Fitzroy. Of course.’
Henry’s bastard is now a princeling of sixteen, though his fine skin, his open gaze, make him seem younger than his age. He has the red-gold hair of King Edward IV’s line; he has a look of Prince Arthur too, Henry’s elder brother who died. He is hesitant as he confronts his bull of a father, hovering in case he is unwanted. But Henry rises and embraces the boy, his face wet with tears. ‘My little son,’ he says, to the child who will soon make six foot. ‘My only son.’ The king is crying so hard now that he has to blot his face on his sleeve. ‘She would have poisoned you,’ he moans. ‘Thank God that by the cunning of Master Secretary the plot was found out in time.’
‘Thank you, Master Secretary,’ the boy says formally. ‘For finding out the plot.’
‘She would have poisoned you and your sister Mary, both of you, and made that little blotch she spawned the heir to England. Or my throne would have passed to whatever she whelped next, God save me, if it lived. I doubt a child of hers could live. She was too wicked. God abandoned her. Pray for your father, pray God does not abandon me. I have sinned, I must have. The marriage was illicit.’
‘What, this one was?’ the boy says. ‘This one as well?’
‘Illicit and accursed.’ Henry rocks the boy back and forth, gripping him ferociously, fists clenched behind his back: so, perhaps, does a bear crush her cubs. ‘The marriage was outside God’s law. Nothing could make it lawful. Neither of them was my wife, not this one and not the other, thank God she is in her grave now, and I do not have to listen to her snuffling and praying and entreating and meddling in my business. Do not tell me there were dispensations, I do not want to hear it, no Pope can dispense from the law of Heaven. How did she ever come near me, Anne Boleyn? Why did I ever look at her? Why did she blind my eyes? There are so many women in the world, so many fresh and young and virtuous women, so many good and kind women. Why have I been cursed with women who destroy the children in their own wombs?’
He lets the boy go, so abruptly that he staggers.
Henry sniffs. ‘Go now, child. To your own guiltless bed. And you, Master Secretary, to your…back to your own people.’ The king blots his face with his handkerchief. ‘I am too tired to confess tonight, my lord archbishop. You may go home too. But you will come again, and absolve me.’
It seems a comfortable idea. Cranmer hesitates: but he is not one to press for secrets. As they leave the chamber, Henry takes up his little book; absorbed, he turns the pages, and settles down to read his own story.
Outside the king’s chamber he gives the signal to the hovering gentlemen. ‘Go i
n and see if he wants anything.’ Slow, reluctant, his body servants creep towards Henry in his lair: unsure of their welcome, unsure of everything. Pastime with good company: but where’s the company now? It’s cringing against the wall.
He takes his leave of Cranmer, embracing him, whispering: ‘All will work for good.’ Young Richmond touches his arm: ‘Master Secretary, there is something I must tell you.’
He is tired. He was up at dawn writing letters into Europe. ‘Is it urgent, my lord?’
‘No. But it is important.’
Imagine having a master who knows the difference. ‘Go ahead, my lord, I am all attention.’
‘I want to tell you, I have had a woman now.’
‘I hope that she was all you desired.’
The boy laughs uncertainly. ‘Not really. She was a whore. My brother Surrey arranged it for me.’ Norfolk’s son, he means. By the light of a sconce, the boy’s face flickers, gold to black to cross-hatched gold again, as if he were dipped in shadows. ‘But this being so, I am a man, and I think Norfolk should let me live with my wife.’
Richmond has already been married off, to Norfolk’s daughter, little Mary Howard. For reasons of his own, Norfolk has kept the children apart; if Anne had given Henry a son in wedlock, the bastard boy would be worthless to the king, and it has entered Norfolk’s calculations that in that case, if his daughter was a virgin, he could perhaps marry her more usefully elsewhere.
But all those calculations are needless now. ‘I’ll speak to the duke for you,’ he says. ‘I think he will now be keen to fall in with your wishes.’
Richmond flushes: pleasure, embarrassment? The boy is no fool and knows his situation, which in a few days has improved beyond all measure. He, Cromwell, can hear the voice of Norfolk, as clear as if he were reasoning in the king’s council: Katherine’s daughter has been made a bastard already, Anne’s daughter will follow, so all three of Henry’s children are illegitimate. If that is so, why not prefer the male to the female?
‘Master Secretary,’ the boy says, ‘the servants in my household are saying Elizabeth is not even the queen’s child. They say she was smuggled into the bedchamber in a basket, and the queen’s dead child carried out.’
‘Why would she do that?’ He is always curious to hear the reasoning of household servants.
‘It is because, to be queen, she struck a bargain with the devil. But the devil always cheats you. He let her be queen, but he would not let her bear a live child.’
‘You would think the devil would have sharpened her wit, though. If she was bringing in a baby in a basket, surely she would have brought in a boy?’
Richmond manages a miserable smile. ‘Perhaps she laid hold of the only baby she could get. After all, people do not leave them in the street.’
They do, though. He is bringing in a bill to the new Parliament, to provide for the orphan boys of London. His idea is, look after the orphan boys, and they will look after the girls.
‘Sometimes,’ the boy says, ‘I think about the cardinal. Do you ever think of him?’ He sinks down to sit on a chest; and he, Cromwell, sits down with him. ‘When I was a very little child, and very foolish as children are, I used to think the cardinal was my father.’
‘The cardinal was your godfather.’
‘Yes, but I thought…Because he was so tender to me. He would visit me and carry me, and though he gave me great gifts of gold plate, he brought me a silk ball and also a doll, which you know, boys do like…’ he drops his head, ‘when they are little children, and I am speaking of when I was still in a gown. I knew there was some secret about me, and I thought that was it, that I was a priest’s son. When the king came he was a stranger to me. He brought me a sword.’
‘And did you guess then that he was your father?’
‘No,’ says the boy. He opens his hands, to show his helpless nature, the nature he had as a little child. ‘No. It had to be explained to me. Do not tell him, please. He would not understand.’
Of all the shocks the king has received, it could be the greatest, to know that his son did not recognise him. ‘Has he many other children?’ Richmond asks. He speaks, now, with the authority of a man of the world. ‘I suppose he must have.’
‘To my knowledge, he has no child who could hurt your claim. They said Mary Boleyn’s son was his, but she was married at the time and the boy took her husband’s name.’
‘But I suppose he will marry Mistress Seymour now, when this marriage,’ the boy stumbles over his words, ‘when whatever is to happen, when it happens. And she will have a son, perhaps, because the Seymours are fertile stock.’
‘If that occurs,’ he says gently, ‘you must stand ready, the first to congratulate the king. And you must be prepared all your life to place yourself at the service of this little prince. But on a more immediate matter, if I may advise…if your living with your wife should be further delayed, it is best to find a kind and clean young woman and make an arrangement with her. Then when you part from her, pay her some small retainer so she does not talk about you.’
‘Is that what you do, Master Secretary?’ The question is ingenuous, but for a moment he wonders if the boy is spying for someone.
‘It is better not discussed between gentlemen,’ he says. ‘And emulate your father the king, who in speaking of women is never coarse.’ Violent, perhaps, he thinks: but never coarse. ‘Be prudent and do not deal with whores. You must not catch a disease, like the French king. Then also, if your young woman gives you a child, you have its keeping and bringing up, and you know it is not another man’s.’
‘But you cannot be sure…’ Richmond breaks off. The realities of the world are tumbling in fast on this young man. ‘If the king can be deceived, surely any man can be deceived. If married ladies are false, any gentleman could be bringing up another man’s child.’
He smiles. ‘But another gentleman would be bringing up his.’
He means to begin, when he has time to plan it, some form of registration, documentation to record baptisms so he can count the king’s subjects and know who they are, or at least, who their mothers say they are: family name and paternity are two different things, but one must start somewhere. He scans the faces of the Londoners as he rides through the city, and he thinks of streets in other cities where he has lived or passed through, and he wonders. I could do with more children, he thinks. He has been continent in his living as far as it is reasonable for a man to be, but the cardinal used to invent scandals about him and his many concubines. Whenever some stout young felon was dragged to the gallows, the cardinal would say, ‘There, Thomas, that will be one of yours.’
The boy yawns. ‘I am so tired,’ he says. ‘Yet I have not been hunting today. So I don’t know why.’
Richmond’s servants are hovering: their badge a demi-lion rampant, their livery of blue and yellow faded in the failing light. Like nursemaids snatching up a child from muddy puddles, they want to sweep the young duke away from whatever Cromwell is plotting. There is a climate of fear and he has created it. Nobody knows how long the arrests will go on and who else will be taken. He feels even he does not know, and he is in charge of it. George Boleyn is lodged in the Tower. Weston and Brereton have been allowed a last night to sleep in the world, a few hours’ grace to arrange their affairs; this time tomorrow the key will have turned on them: they could run, but where to? None of the men except Mark have been properly interrogated: that is to say, interrogated by him. But the scrapping for the spoils has begun. Norris had not been in ward for a day before the first letter came in, seeking a share of his offices and privileges, from a man who pleaded he had fourteen children. Fourteen hungry mouths: not to mention the man’s own needs, and the snapping teeth of his lady wife.
* * *
Next day, early, he says to William Fitzwilliam, ‘Come with me to the Tower to talk to Norris.’
Fitz says, ‘No, you go. I cannot do it a second time. I have known him all my years. The first time nearly killed me.’
Gentle Norris: chief bottom-wiper to the king, spinner of silk threads, spider of spiders, black centre of the vast dripping web of court patronage: what a spry and amiable man he is, past forty but wearing it lightly. Norris is a man always in equipoise, a living illustration of the art of sprezzatura. No one has ever seen him ruffled. He has the air of a man who has not so much achieved success, as become resigned to it. He is as courteous to a dairy maid as to a duke; at least, for as long he has an audience. A master of the tournament ground, he breaks a lance with an air of apology, and when he counts the coin of the realm he washes his hands afterwards, in spring water scented with rose petals.
Nevertheless, Harry has grown rich, as those about the king cannot help but grow rich, however modestly they strive; when Harry snaps up some perquisite, it is as if he, your obedient servant, were sweeping away from your sight something distasteful. And when he volunteers for some lucrative office, it is as if he is doing it out of a sense of duty, and to save lesser men the trouble.
But look at Gentle Norris now! It is a sad thing to see a strong man weep. He says so, as he sits down, and enquires after his keeping, whether he is being served with the food he likes and how he has slept. His manner is benign and easy. ‘During the days of Christmas last, Master Norris, you impersonated a Moor, and William Brereton showed himself half-naked in the guise of a hunter or wild man of the woods, going towards the queen’s chamber.’
‘For God’s sake, Cromwell,’ Norris sniffs. ‘Are you in earnest? You are asking me in all seriousness about what we did when we were costumed for a masque?’
‘I counselled him, William Brereton, against exposing his person. Your retort was that the queen had seen it many a time.’
Norris reddens: as he did on the date in question. ‘You mistake me on purpose. You know I meant that she is a married woman and so a man’s…a man’s gear is no strange sight to her.’
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