Wyatt does not answer. The silence extends, settles around them: a drowsy silence, as elsewhere leaves unfurl, may blossoms on the trees, water tinkles into fountains, young people laugh in gardens. At last Wyatt speaks, his voice strained: ‘It was not testimony.’
‘What was it then?’ He leans forward. ‘You know I am not a man with whom you can have inconsequential conversations. I cannot split myself into two, one your friend and the other the king’s servant. So you must tell me: will you write down your thoughts, and if you are requested, will you say one word?’ He sits back. ‘And if you can reassure me on this point, I will write to your father, to reassure him in turn. To tell him you will come out of this alive.’ He pauses. ‘May I do so?’
Wyatt nods. The smallest possible gesture, a nod to the future.
‘Good. Afterwards, for your trouble, to compensate you for this detention, I will arrange for you to have a sum of money.’
‘I don’t want it.’ Wyatt turns his face away, deliberately: like a child.
‘Believe me, you do. You are still trailing debts from your time in Italy. Your creditors come to me.’
‘I’m not your brother. You’re not my keeper.’
He looks about him. ‘I am, if you think about it.’
Wyatt says, ‘I hear Henry wants an annulment too. To kill her and be divorced from her, all in one day. That is how she is, you see. Everything is ruled by extremes. She would not be his mistress, she must be queen of England; so there is breaking of faith and making of laws, so the country is set in an uproar. If he had such trouble to get her, what must it cost him to be rid? Even after she is dead, he had better make sure to nail her down.’
He says curiously, ‘Have you no tenderness left for her?’
‘She has exhausted it,’ Wyatt says shortly. ‘Or perhaps I never had any, I do not know my own mind, you know it. I dare say men have felt many things for Anne, but no one except Henry has felt tenderness. Now he thinks he’s been taken for a fool.’
He stands up. ‘I shall write some comfortable words to your father. I will explain you must stay here a little space, it is safest. But first I must…we thought Henry had dropped the annulment, but now, as you say, he revives it, so I must…’
Wyatt says, as if relishing his discomfort, ‘You’ll have to go and see Harry Percy, won’t you?’
It is now almost four years since, with Call-Me-Risley at his heels, he had confronted Harry Percy at a low inn called Mark and the Lion, and made him understand certain truths about life: the paramount truth being, that he was not, whatever he thought, married to Anne Boleyn. On that day he had slammed his hand on the table and told the young man that if he did not get himself out of the way of the king, he would be destroyed: that he, Thomas Cromwell, would let his creditors loose to destroy him, and rip away his earldom and his lands. He had slammed his hand on the table and told him that, further, if he did not forget Anne Boleyn and any claim he made on her, her uncle the Duke of Norfolk would find out where he hid and bite his bollocks off.
Since then, he has done much business with the earl, who is now a sick and broken young man, heavily in debt, his hold on his affairs slipping away from him day by day. In fact, the judgement is almost accomplished, the judgement he had invoked: except that the earl still has his bollocks, as far as anybody knows. After their talk at Mark and the Lion the earl, who had been drinking for some days, had caused his servants to sponge his clothes, wiping away trails of vomit: sour-smelling, rawly shaven, trembling and green with nausea, he had presented himself before the king’s council, and obliged him, Thomas Cromwell, by rewriting the history of his infatuation: by forswearing any claim on Anne Boleyn; by affirming that no contract of marriage had ever existed between them; that on his honour as a nobleman he had never tupped her, and that she was completely free for the king’s hands, heart and marriage bed. On which, he had taken his Bible oath, the book held by old Warham, who was archbishop before Thomas Cranmer: on which, he had received the Holy Sacrament, with Henry’s eyes boring into his back.
Now he, Cromwell, rides over to meet the earl at his country house in Stoke Newington, which lies north and east of the city on the Cambridge road. Percy’s servants take their horses, but rather than entering at once he stands back from the house to take a view of the roof and chimneys. ‘Fifty pounds spent before next winter would be a good investment,’ he says to Thomas Wriothesley. ‘Not counting the labour.’ If he had a ladder he could go up and look at the state of the leads. But that would perhaps not be consonant with his dignity. Master Secretary can do anything he likes, but the Master of the Rolls has to think of his ancient office and what is due to it. Whether, as the king’s Vicegerent in Spirituals, he is allowed to climb about on roofs…who knows? The office is too new and untried. He grins. Certainly, it would be an affront to the dignity of Master Wriothesley, if he were asked to foot the ladder. ‘I’m thinking about my investment,’ he tells Wriothesley. ‘Mine and the king’s.’
The earl owes him considerable sums, but he owes the king ten thousand pounds. After Harry Percy is dead, his earldom will be swallowed by the Crown: so he examines the earl too, to judge how sound he is. He is jaundiced, hollow-cheeked, looks older than his age, which is some thirty-four, thirty-five; and that sour smell that hangs in the air, it takes him back to Kimbolton, to the old queen shut up in her apartments: the fusty, unaired room like a gaol, and the bowl of vomit that passed him, in the hands of one of her girls. He says without much hope, ‘You haven’t been sick because of my visit?’
The earl looks at him from a sunken eye. ‘No. They say it is my liver. No, on the whole, Cromwell, you have dealt very reasonably with me, I must say. Considering –’
‘Considering what I threatened you with.’ He shakes his head, rueful. ‘Oh, my lord. Today I stand before you a poor suitor. You will never guess my errand.’
‘I think I would.’
‘I put it to you, my lord, that you are married to Anne Boleyn.’
‘No.’
‘I put it to you that in or about the year 1523, you made a secret contract of marriage with her, and that therefore her so-called marriage with the king is null.’
‘No.’ From somewhere, the earl finds a spark of his ancestral spirit, that border fire which burns in the north parts of the kingdom, and roasts any Scot in its path. ‘You made me swear, Cromwell. You came to me where I was drinking at Mark and the Lion, and you threatened me. I was dragged before the council and I was made to swear on the Bible that I had no contract with Anne. I was made to go with the king and take communion. You saw me, you heard me. How can I take it back now? Are you saying I committed perjury?’
The earl is on his feet. He remains seated. He does not mean any discourtesy; rather he thinks that, if he stands up, he might fetch the earl a slap, and he has never to his knowledge assaulted a sick man. ‘Not perjury,’ he says amicably. ‘I put it to you that on that occasion, your memory failed.’
‘I was married to Anne, but had forgotten?’
He sits back and considers his adversary. ‘You have always been a drinker, my lord, which is how, I believe, you are reduced to your present condition. On the day in question I found you, as you say, at a tavern. Is it possible that when you came before the council, you were still drunk? And therefore you were confused about what you were swearing?’
‘I was sober.’
‘Your head ached. You were nauseous. You were afraid you might be sick on the reverend shoes of Archbishop Warham. The possibility so perturbed you that you could think of nothing else. You were not attentive to the questions put to you. That was hardly your fault.’
‘But,’ the earl says, ‘I was attentive.’
‘Any councillor would understand your plight. We have all been in drink, one time or another.’
‘Upon my soul, I was attentive.’
‘Then consider another possibility. Perhaps there was some slackness in the taking of the oath. Some irregularity. The old archbishop, h
e was ill himself that day. I remember how his hands trembled as he held the holy book.’
‘He was palsied. It is common in age. But he was competent.’
‘If there was some defect in the procedure, your conscience should not trouble you, if you were now to repudiate your oath. Perhaps, you know, it was not even a Bible?’
‘It was bound like a Bible,’ the earl says.
‘I have a book on accountancy that is often mistaken for a Bible.’
‘Especially by you.’
He grins. The earl is not entirely addle-witted, not yet.
‘And what about the sacred host?’ Percy says. ‘I took the sacrament to seal my oath, and was that not the very body of God?’
He is silent. I could give you an argument about that, he thinks, but I will not give you an opening to call me a heretic.
‘I will not do it,’ Percy says. ‘And I cannot see why I should. All I hear is, that Henry means to kill her. Isn’t it enough for her to be dead? After she is dead what does it matter who she was contracted to?’
‘It does, in the one way. He is suspicious about the child Anne had. But he does not want to press inquiries into who is her father.’
‘Elizabeth? I have seen the thing,’ Percy says. ‘She’s his. I can tell you that much.’
‘But if she were…even if she were, he now thinks to put her out of the succession, so if he was never married to her mother – well, at a stroke the matter is clear. The way is open for the children of his next wife.’
The earl nods. ‘I see that.’
‘So if you want to help Anne, this is your last chance.’
‘How will it help her, to have her marriage annulled and her child bastardised?’
‘It might save her life. If Henry’s temper cools.’
‘You will make sure to keep it hot. You will heap on the fuel and apply the bellows, will you not?’
He shrugs. ‘It is nothing to me. I do not hate the queen, I leave that to others. So, if you had ever any regard for her –’
‘I cannot help her any more. I can only help myself. God knows the truth. You made me a liar as I stood before God. Now you want to make me a fool as I stand before men. You must find another way, Master Secretary.’
‘I will do that,’ he says easily. He stands up. ‘I am sorry you lose a chance to please the king.’ At the door, he turns back. ‘You are stubborn,’ he says, ‘because you are weak.’
Harry Percy looks up at him. ‘I am worse than weak, Cromwell. I am dying.’
‘You’ll last until the trial, won’t you? I shall put you on the panel of peers. If you are not Anne’s husband, you are clear to be her judge. The court has need of wise and experienced men like yourself.’
Harry Percy cries out after him, but he leaves the hall with long strides, and gives the gentlemen outside the door a shake of the head. ‘Well,’ Master Wriothesley says, ‘I made sure you would bounce him into sense.’
‘Sense has fled.’
‘You look gloomy, sir.’
‘Do I, Call-Me? I can’t think why.’
‘We can still free the king. My lord archbishop will see a way. Even if we have to bring Mary Boleyn into it, and say the marriage was unlawful through affinity.’
‘Our difficulty is, in the case of Mary Boleyn, the king was apprised of the facts. He may not have known if Anne was secretly married. But he always knew she was Mary’s sister.’
‘Have you ever done anything like that?’ Master Wriothesley asks thoughtfully. ‘Two sisters?’
‘Is that the kind of question that absorbs you at this time?’
‘Only one wonders. How it would be. They say Mary Boleyn was a great whore when she was at the French court. Do you think King Francis had them both?’
He looks at Wriothesley with new respect. ‘There is an angle I might explore. Now…because you have been a good boy and not struck out at Harry Percy or called him names, but waited patiently outside the door as you were bade, I’ll tell you something you will like to know. Once, when she found herself between patrons, Mary Boleyn asked me to marry her.’
Master Wriothesley gapes at him. He follows, uttering broken syllables. What? When? Why? Only when they are on horseback does he speak to the purpose. ‘God strike me. You would have been the king’s brother-in-law.’
‘But not for much longer,’ he says.
The day is breezy and fine. They make good speed back to London. In other days, in other company, he would have enjoyed the journey.
But what company would that be, he wonders, dismounting at Whitehall. Bess Seymour’s? ‘Master Wriothesley,’ he asks, ‘can you read my mind?’
‘No,’ says Call-Me. He looks baffled, and somehow affronted.
‘Do you think a bishop could read my mind?’
‘No, sir.’
He nods. ‘Just as well.’
The Imperial ambassador comes to see him, wearing his Christmas hat. ‘Especially for you, Thomas,’ he says, ‘because I know it makes you happy.’ He sits down, signals to the servant for wine. The servant is Christophe. ‘Do you use this ruffian for every purpose?’ Chapuys asks. ‘Is it not he who tortured the boy Mark?’
‘Firstly, Mark is not a boy, he is only immature. Secondly, no one tortured him.’ At least, he says, ‘not in my sight or hearing, not at my command nor suggestion, nor with my permission, expressed or implied’.
‘I feel you preparing yourself for the courtroom,’ Chapuys says. ‘A knotted rope, was it not? Tightened around the brow? So you threatened to pop out his eyes?’
He is angry. ‘This may be what they do where you were brought up. I have never heard of such a practice.’
‘So it was the rack instead?’
‘You can see him at his trial. You can judge for yourself whether he is damaged. I have seen men who have been racked. Not here. Abroad, I have seen it. They have to be carried in a chair. Mark is as nimble as in his dancing days.’
‘If you say so.’ Chapuys seems pleased to have provoked him. ‘And how is your heretic queen now?’
‘Brave as a lion. You will be sorry to learn.’
‘And proud, but she will be humbled. She is no lion, and no more than one of your London cats that sing on rooftops.’
He thinks of a black cat he used to have. Marlinspike. After some years of fighting and scavenging he ran off, as cats do, to make his career elsewhere. Chapuys says, ‘As you know, a number of ladies and gentlemen of the court have ridden up to the Princess Mary, to assure her of their services in the time which is at hand. I thought you might go yourself.’
God damn it, he thinks, I am already fully employed, and more than fully; it is no small enterprise, to bring down a queen of England. He says, ‘I trust the princess will forgive my absence at this time. It is to do her good.’
‘You have no trouble calling her “the princess” now,’ Chapuys observes. ‘She will be reinstated, of course, as Henry’s heir.’ He waits. ‘She expects, all her loyal supporters expect, the Emperor himself expects…’
‘Hope is a great virtue. But,’ he adds, ‘I hope you will warn her not to receive any persons without permission from the king. Or from me.’
‘She cannot stop them resorting to her. All her old household. They flock. It will be a new world, Thomas.’
‘The king will be eager, is eager, for a reconciliation with her. He is a good father.’
‘A pity he has not had more opportunity to show it.’
‘Eustache…’ He pauses, waves Christophe away. ‘I know you have never married, but have you no children? Do not look so startled. I am curious about your life. We must come to know each other better.’
The ambassador bristles at the change of topic. ‘I do not meddle with women. Not like you.’
‘I would not turn away a child. No one ever makes a claim on me. If they did, I would meet it.’
‘The ladies do not wish to prolong the encounter,’ Chapuys suggests.
That makes him laugh. ‘You may be r
ight. Come, my good friend, let us have our supper.’
‘I look forward to many more such convivial evenings,’ the ambassador says, beaming. ‘Once the concubine is dead, and England is at ease.’
* * *
The men in the Tower, though they lament their likely fate, do not complain as sorely as the king does. By day he walks around like an illustration from the Book of Job. By night he glides down the river, accompanied by musicians, to visit Jane.
For all the beauties of Nicholas Carew’s house, it is eight miles from the Thames and so not convenient for evening journeys, even in these light nights of early summer; the king wants to stay with Jane till darkness falls. So the queen-in-waiting has come up to London, to be housed by her supporters and friends. Crowds surge about from one rumoured spot to another, trying to catch a glimpse of her, necks craning, eyes popping, the curious blocking gateways and hoisting each other up on walls.
Her brothers throw out largesse to the Londoners, in the hope of winning their voices for her. The word is put about that she is an English gentlewoman, one of our own; unlike Anne Boleyn, whom many believe to be French. But the crowds are puzzled, even rancorous: ought not the king to marry a great princess, like Katherine, from a faraway land?
Bess Seymour tells him, ‘Jane is squirrelling away money in a locked chest, in case the king changes his mind.’
‘So should we all. A locked chest is a good thing to have.’
‘She keeps the key in her bosom,’ Bess says.
‘No one is likely to come at it there.’
Bess gives him a merry look, out of the tail of her eye.
By now, the news of Anne’s arrest is beginning to ripple through Europe, and though Bess does not know it, offers for Henry are coming in hour by hour. The Emperor suggests that the king might like his niece the Infanta of Portugal, who would come with 400,000 ducats; and the Portuguese Prince Dom Luis could marry the Princess Mary. Or if the king does not want the Infanta, what would he say to the dowager Duchess of Milan, a very pretty young widow, who would bring him a good sum also?
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