by Hilary Mante
The cardinal bows his head, frowns at a paper on his desk; he is allowing time for the difficult moment to pass, and when he speaks again his tone is measured and easy, like a man telling anecdotes after supper. ‘When I was a child, my father had a friend – a customer, really – who was of a florid complexion.’ He touches his sleeve, in illustration. ‘Like this … scarlet. Revell was his name, Miles Revell.’ His hand drifts to rest again, palm downwards on the blackish damask. ‘For some reason I used to believe … though I dare say he was an honest citizen, and liked a glass of Rhenish … I used to believe he was a drinker of blood. I don't know … some story I suppose that I had heard from my nurse, or from some other silly child … and then when my father's apprentices knew about it – only because I was foolish enough to whine and cry – they would shout out, “Here comes Revell for his cup of blood, run, Thomas Wolsey …” I used to flee as if the devil were after me. Put the marketplace between us. I marvel that I didn't fall under a wagon. I used to run, and never look. Even today,’ he says – he picks up a wax seal from the desk, turns it over, turns it over, puts it down – ‘even today, when I see a fair, florid man – let us say, the Duke of Suffolk – I feel inclined to burst into tears.’ He pauses. His gaze comes to rest. ‘So, Thomas … can't a cleric stand up, unless you think he's after your blood?’ He picks up the seal again; he turns it over in his fingers; he averts his eyes; he begins to play with words. ‘Would a bishop abash you? A parish clerk panic you? A deacon disconcert?’
He says, ‘What is the word? I don't know in English … an estoc …’
Perhaps there is no English word for it: the short-bladed knife that, at close quarters, you push up under the ribs. The cardinal says, ‘And this was …?’
This was some twenty years ago. The lesson is learned and learned well. Night, ice, the still heart of Europe; a forest, lakes silver beneath a pattern of winter stars; a room, firelight, a shape slipping against the wall. He didn't see his assassin, but he saw his shadow move.
‘All the same …’ says the cardinal. ‘It's forty years since I saw Master Revell. He will be long dead, I suppose. And your man?’ He hesitates. ‘Long dead too?’
It is the most delicate way that can be contrived, to ask a man if he has killed someone.
‘And in Hell, I should think. If your lordship pleases.’
That makes Wolsey smile; not the mention of Hell, but the bow to the breadth of his jurisdiction. ‘So if you attacked the young Cromwell, you went straight to the fiery pit?’
‘If you had seen him, my lord. He was too dirty for Purgatory. The Blood of the Lamb can do much, we are told, but I doubt if it could have wiped this fellow clean.’
‘I am all for a spotless world,’ Wolsey says. He looks sad. ‘Have you made a good confession?’
‘It was a long time ago.’
‘Have you made a good confession?’
‘My lord cardinal, I was a soldier.’
‘Soldiers have hope of Heaven.’
He looks up into Wolsey's face. There's no knowing what he believes. He says, ‘We all have that.’ Soldiers, beggars, sailors, kings.
‘So you were a ruffian in your youth,’ the cardinal says. ‘Ça ne fait rien.’ He broods. ‘This dirty fellow who attacked you … he was not, in fact, in holy orders?’
He smiles. ‘I didn't ask.’
‘These tricks of memory …’ the cardinal says. ‘Thomas, I shall try not to move without giving you warning. And in that way we shall do very well together.’
But the cardinal looks him over; he is still puzzling. It is early in their association and his character, as invented by the cardinal, is at this stage a work in progress; in fact, perhaps it is this evening that sets it going? In the years to come, the cardinal will say, ‘I often wonder, about the monastic ideal – especially as applied to the young. My servant Cromwell, for instance – his youth was secluded, spent almost entirely in fasting, prayer and study of the Church Fathers. That's why he's so wild nowadays.’
And when people say, is he? – recalling, as best they can, a man who seems peculiarly discreet; when they say, really? Your man Cromwell? the cardinal will shake his head and say, but I try to mend matters, of course. When he breaks the windows we just call in the glaziers and part with the cash. As for the procession of aggrieved young women … Poor creatures, I pay them off …
But tonight he is back to business; hands clasped on his desk, as if holding together the evening passed. ‘Come now, Thomas, you were telling me of a rumour.’
‘The women judge from orders to the silk merchants that the king has a new –’ He breaks off and says, ‘My lord, what do you call a whore when she is a knight's daughter?’
‘Ah,’ the cardinal says, entering into the problem. ‘To her face, “my lady.” Behind her back – well, what is her name? Which knight?’
He nods to where, ten minutes ago, Boleyn stood.
The cardinal looks alarmed. ‘Why did you not speak up?’
‘How could I have introduced the topic?’
The cardinal bows to the difficulty.
‘But it is not the Boleyn lady new at court. Not Harry Percy's lady. It is her sister.’
‘I see.’ The cardinal drops back in his chair. ‘Of course.’
Mary Boleyn is a kind little blonde, who is said to have been passed all around the French court before coming home to this one, scattering goodwill, her frowning little sister trotting always at her heels.
‘Of course, I have followed the direction of His Majesty's eye,’ the cardinal says. He nods to himself. ‘Are they now close? Does the queen know? Or can't you say?’
He nods. The cardinal sighs. ‘Katherine is a saint. Still, if I were a saint, and a queen, perhaps I would feel I could take no harm from Mary Boleyn. Presents, eh? What sort? Not lavish, you say? I am sorry for her then; she should seize her advantage while it lasts. It's not that our king has so many adventures, though they do say … they say that when His Majesty was young, not yet king, it was Boleyn's wife who relieved him of his virgin state.’
‘Elizabeth Boleyn?’ He is not often surprised. ‘This one's mother?’
‘The same. Perhaps the king lacks imagination in that way. Not that I ever believed it … If we were at the other side, you know,’ he gestures in the direction of Dover, ‘we wouldn't even try to keep track of the women. My friend King François – they do say he once oozed up to the lady he'd been with the night before, gave her a formal kiss of the hand, asked her name, and wished they might be better friends.’ He bobs his head, liking the success of his story. ‘But Mary won't cause difficulties. She's an easy armful. The king could do worse.’
‘But her family will want to get something out of it. What did they get before?’
‘The chance to make themselves useful.’ Wolsey breaks off and makes a note. He can imagine its content: what Boleyn can have, if he asks nicely. The cardinal looks up. ‘So should I have been, in my interview with Sir Thomas – how shall I put it – more douce?’
‘I don't think my lord could have been sweeter. Witness his face when he left us. The picture of soothed gratification.’
‘Thomas, from now on, any London gossip,’ he touches the damask cloth, ‘bring it right here to me. Don't trouble about the source. Let the trouble be mine. And I promise never to assault you. Truly.’
‘It is forgotten.’
‘I doubt that. Not if you've carried the lesson all these years.’ The cardinal sits back; he considers. ‘At least she is married.’ Mary Boleyn, he means. ‘So if she whelps, he can acknowledge it or not, as he pleases. He has a boy from John Blount's daughter and he won't want too many.’
Too large a royal nursery can be encumbering to a king. The example of history and of other nations shows that the mothers fight for status, and try to get their brats induced somehow into the line of succession. The son Henry acknowledges is known as Henry Fitzroy; he is a handsome blond child made in the king's own image. His father has created him D
uke of Somerset and Duke of Richmond; he is not yet ten years old, and the senior nobleman in England.
Queen Katherine, whose boys have all died, takes it patiently: that is to say, she suffers.
When he leaves the cardinal, he is miserably angry. When he thinks back to his earlier life – that boy half-dead on the cobbles in Putney – he feels no tenderness for him, just a faint impatience: why doesn't he get up? For his later self – still prone to getting into fights, or at least being in the place where a fight might occur – he feels something like contempt, washed with a queasy anxiety. That was the way of the world: a knife in the dark, a movement on the edge of vision, a series of warnings which have worked themselves into flesh. He has given the cardinal a shock, which is not his job; his job, as he has defined it at this time, is to feed the cardinal information and soothe his temper and understand him and embellish his jokes. What went wrong was an accident of timing only. If the cardinal had not moved so fast; if he had not been so edgy, not knowing how he could signal to him to be less despotic to Boleyn. The trouble with England, he thinks, is that it's so poor in gesture. We shall have to develop a hand signal for ‘Back off, our prince is fucking this man's daughter.’ He is surprised that the Italians have not done it. Though perhaps they have, and he just never caught on.
In the year 1529, my lord cardinal newly disgraced, he will think back to that evening.
He is at Esher; it is the lightless, fireless night, when the great man has gone to his (possibly damp) bed, and there is only George Cavendish to keep his spirits alive. What happened next, he asked George, with Harry Percy and Anne Boleyn?
He knew the story only in the cardinal's chilly and dismissive rendition. But George said, ‘I shall tell you how it was. Now. Stand up, Master Cromwell.’ He does it. ‘A little to the left. Now, which would you like to be? My lord cardinal, or the young heir?’
‘Oh, I see, is it a play? You be the cardinal. I don't feel equal to it.’
Cavendish adjusts his position, turning him imperceptibly from the window, where night and bare trees are their audience. His gaze rests on the air, as if he were seeing the past: shadowy bodies, moving in this lightless room. ‘Can you look troubled?’ George asks. ‘As if you were brooding upon mutinous speech, and yet dare not speak? No, no, not like that. You are youthful, gangling, your head drooping, you are blushing.’ Cavendish sighs. ‘I believe you never blushed in your life, Master Cromwell. Look.’ Cavendish sets his hands, gently, on his upper arms. ‘Let us change roles. Sit here. You be the cardinal.’
At once he sees Cavendish transformed. George twitches, he fumbles, he all but weeps; he becomes the quaking Harry Percy, a young man in love. ‘Why should I not match with her?’ he cries. ‘Though she be but a simple maid –’
‘Simple?’ he says. ‘Maid?’
George glares at him. ‘The cardinal never said that!’
‘Not at the time, I agree.’
‘Now I am Harry Percy again. “Though she be but a simple maid, her father a mere knight, yet her lineage is good –”’
‘She's some sort of cousin of the king's, isn't she?’
‘Some sort of cousin?’ Cavendish again breaks up his role, indignant. ‘My lord cardinal would have their descent unfolded before him, all drawn up by the heralds.’
‘So what shall I do?’
‘Just pretend! Now: her forebears are not without merit, young Percy argues. But the stronger the boy argues, the more my lord cardinal waxes into a temper. The boy says, we have made a contract of matrimony, which is as good as a true marriage …’
‘Does he? I mean, did he?’
‘Yes, that was the sense of it. Good as a true marriage.’
‘And what did my lord cardinal do there?’
‘He said, good God, boy, what are you telling me? If you have involved yourself in any such false proceeding, the king must hear of it. I shall send for your father, and between us we will contrive to annul this folly of yours.’
‘And Harry Percy said?’
‘Not much. He hung his head.’
‘I wonder the girl had any respect for him.’
‘She didn't. She liked his title.’
‘I see.’
‘So then his father came down from the north – will you be the earl, or will you be the boy?’
‘The boy. I know how to do it now.’
He jumps to his feet and imitates penitence. It seems they had a long talk in a long gallery, the earl and the cardinal; then they had a glass of wine. Something strong, it must have been. The earl stamped the length of the gallery, then sat down, Cavendish said, on a bench where the waiting-boys used to rest between orders. He called his heir to stand before him, and took him apart in front of the servants.
‘“Sir,”’ says Cavendish, ‘“thou hast always been a proud, presumptuous, disdainful and very unthrift waster.” So that was a good start, wasn't it?’
‘I like,’ he says, ‘the way you remember the exact words. Did you write them down at the time? Or do you use some licence?’
Cavendish looks sly. ‘No one exceeds your own powers of memory,’ he says. ‘My lord cardinal asks for an accounting of something or other, and you have all the figures at your fingertips.’
‘Perhaps I invent them.’
‘Oh, I don't think so.’ Cavendish is shocked. ‘You couldn't do that for long.’
‘It is a method of remembering. I learned it in Italy.’
‘There are people, in this household and elsewhere, who would give much to know the whole of what you learned in Italy.’
He nods. Of course they would. ‘But now, where were we? Harry Percy, who is as good as married, you say, to Lady Anne Boleyn, is standing before his father, and the father says …?’
‘That if he comes into the title, he would be the death of his noble house – he would be the last earl of Northumberland there ever was. And “Praise be to God,” he says, “I have more choice of boys …” And he stamped off. And the boy was left crying. He had his heart set on Lady Anne. But the cardinal married him to Mary Talbot, and now they're as miserable as dawn on Ash Wednesday. And the Lady Anne said – well, we all laughed at the time – she said that if she could work my lord cardinal any displeasure, she would do it. Can you think how we laughed? Some sallow chit, forgive me, a knight's daughter, to menace my lord cardinal! Her nose out of joint because she could not have an earl! But we could not know how she would rise and rise.’
He smiles.
‘So tell me,’ Cavendish says, ‘what did we do wrong? I'll tell you. All along, we were misled, the cardinal, young Harry Percy, his father, you, me – because when the king said, Mistress Anne is not to marry into Northumberland, I think, I think, the king had his eye cast on her, all that long time ago.’
‘While he was close with Mary, he was thinking about sister Anne?’
‘Yes, yes!’
‘I wonder,’ he says, ‘how it can be that, though all these people think they know the king's pleasure, the king finds himself at every turn impeded.’ At every turn, thwarted: maddened and baffled. The Lady Anne, whom he has chosen to amuse him, while the old wife is cast off and the new wife brought in, refuses to accommodate him at all. How can she refuse? Nobody knows.
Cavendish looks downcast because they have not continued the play. ‘You must be tired,’ he says.
‘No, I'm just thinking. How has my lord cardinal …’ Missed a trick, he wants to say. But that is not a respectful way to speak of a cardinal. He looks up. ‘Go on. What happened next?’
In May 1527, feeling embattled and bad-tempered, the cardinal opens a court of inquiry at York Place, to look into the validity of the king's marriage. It's a secret court; the queen is not required to appear, or even be represented; she's not even supposed to know, but all Europe knows. It is Henry who is ordered to appear, and produce the dispensation that allowed him to marry his brother's widow. He does so, and he is confident that the court will find the document defective in some way. W
olsey is prepared to say that the marriage is open to doubt. But he does not know, he tells Henry, what the legatine court can do for him, beyond this preparatory step; since Katherine, surely, is bound to appeal to Rome.
Six times (to the world's knowledge) Katherine and the king have lived in hope of an heir. ‘I remember the winter child,’ Wolsey says. ‘I suppose, Thomas, you would not be back in England then. The queen was taken unexpectedly with pains and the prince was born early, just at the turn of the year. When he was less than an hour old I held him in my arms, the sleet falling outside the windows, the chamber alive with firelight, the dark coming down by three o'clock, and the tracks of birds and beasts covered that night by the snow, every mark of the old world wiped out, and all our pain abolished. We called him the New Year's prince. We said he would be the richest, the most beautiful, the most devoted. The whole of London was lit up in celebration … He breathed fifty-two days, and I counted every one of them. I think that if he had lived, our king might have been – I do not say a better king, for that could hardly be – but a more contented Christian.’
The next child was a boy who died within an hour. In the year 1516 a daughter was born, the Princess Mary, small but vigorous. The year following, the queen miscarried a male child. Another small princess lived only a few days; her name would have been Elizabeth, after the king's own mother.
Sometimes, says the cardinal, the king speaks of his mother, Elizabeth Plantagenet, and tears stand in his eyes. She was, you know, a lady of great beauty and calm, so meek under the misfortunes God sent her. She and the old king were blessed with many children, and some of them died. But, says the king, my brother Arthur was born to my mother and father within a year of their marriage, and followed, in not too long a time, by another goodly son, which was me. So why have I been left, after twenty years, with one frail daughter whom any vagrant wind may destroy?
