Wolf Hall tct-1

by Hilary Mante

  ‘It does indeed,’ he says, cheerful.

  ‘You said, in the Parliament, some six years ago, that I could not afford a war.’

  It was seven years: 1523. And how long has this audience lasted? Seven minutes? Seven minutes and he is sure already. There's no point backing off; do that and Henry will chase you down. Advance, and he may just falter. He says, ‘No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They're not affordable things. No prince ever says, “This is my budget; so this is the kind of war I can have.” You enter into one and it uses up all the money you've got, and then it breaks you and bankrupts you.’

  ‘When I went into France in the year 1513 I captured the town of Thérouanne, which in your speech you called –’

  ‘A doghole, Majesty.’

  ‘A doghole,’ the king repeats. ‘How could you say so?’

  He shrugs. ‘I've been there.’

  A flash of anger. ‘And so have I, at the head of my army. Listen to me, master – you said I should not fight because the taxes would break the country. What is the country for, but to support its prince in his enterprise?’

  ‘I believe I said – saving Your Majesty – we didn't have the gold to see you through a year's campaign. All the bullion in the country would be swallowed by the war. I have read there was a time when people exchanged leather tokens, for want of metal coins. I said we would be back to those days.’

  ‘You said I was not to lead my troops. You said if I was taken, the country couldn't put up the ransom. So what do you want? You want a king who doesn't fight? You want me to huddle indoors like a sick girl?’

  ‘That would be ideal, for fiscal purposes.’

  The king takes a deep ragged breath. He's been shouting. Now – and it's a narrow thing – he decides to laugh. ‘You advocate prudence. Prudence is a virtue. But there are other virtues that belong to princes.’

  ‘Fortitude.’

  ‘Yes. Cost that out.’

  ‘It doesn't mean courage in battle.’

  ‘Do you read me a lesson?’

  ‘It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.’

  Henry crosses the room. Stamp, stamp, stamp in his riding boots; he is ready for la chasse. He turns, rather slowly, to show his majesty to better effect: wide and square and bright. ‘We will pursue this. What constrains me?’

  ‘The distance,’ he says. ‘The harbours. The terrain, the people. The winter rains and the mud. When Your Majesty's ancestors fought in France, whole provinces were held by England. From there we could supply, we could provision. Now that we have only Calais, how can we support an army in the interior?’

  The king stares out into the silver morning. He bites his lip. Is he in a slow fury, simmering, bubbling to boiling point? He turns, and his smile is sunny. ‘I know,’ he says. ‘So when we next go into France, we will need a sea coast.’

  Of course. We need to take Normandy. Or Brittany. That's all.

  ‘Well reasoned,’ the king says. ‘I bear you no ill will. Only I suppose you have no experience in policy, or the direction of a campaign.’

  He shakes his head. ‘None.’

  ‘You said – before, I mean, in this speech of yours to the Parliament – that there was one million pounds in gold in the realm.’

  ‘I gave a round figure.’

  ‘But how would you find that figure?’

  ‘I trained in the Florentine banks. And in Venice.’

  The king stares at him. ‘Howard said you were a common soldier.’

  ‘That too.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘What would Your Majesty like me to be?’

  The king looks him full in the face: a rare thing with him. He looks back; it is his habit. ‘Master Cromwell, your reputation is bad.’

  He inclines his head.

  ‘You don't defend yourself?’

  ‘Your Majesty is able to form his own opinion.’

  ‘I can. I will.’

  At the door, the guards part their spears; the gentlemen step aside and bow; Suffolk pounds in. Charles Brandon: he looks too hot in his clothes. ‘You ready?’ he says to the king. ‘Oh, Cromwell.’ He grins. ‘How's your fat priest?’

  The king flushes with displeasure. Brandon doesn't notice. ‘You know,’ he chuckles, ‘they say the cardinal once rode out with his servant, and checked his horse at the head of a valley, where looking down he saw a very fair church and its lands about. He says to his servant, Robin, who owns that? I would that were my benefice! Robin says, It is, my lord, it is.’

  His story meets with poor success, but he laughs at it himself.

  He says, ‘My lord, they tell that story all over Italy. Of this cardinal, or that.’

  Brandon's face falls. ‘What, the same story?’

  ‘Mutatis mutandis. The servant isn't called Robin.’

  The king meets his eye. He smiles.

  Leaving, he pushes past the gentlemen, and who should he meet but the king's Secretary! ‘Good morning, good morning!’ he says. He doesn't often repeat things, but the moment seems to call for it.

  Gardiner is rubbing his great blue hands together. ‘Cold, no?’ he says. ‘And how was that, Cromwell? Unpleasant, I think?’

  ‘On the contrary,’ he says. ‘Oh, and he's going out with Suffolk; you'll have to wait.’ He walks on, but then turns. There is a pain like a dull bruise inside his chest. ‘Gardiner, can't we drop this?’

  ‘No,’ Gardiner says. His drooping eyelids flicker. ‘No, I don't see that we can.’

  ‘Fine,’ he says. He walks on. He thinks, you wait. You may have to wait a year or two, but you just wait.

  Esher, two days later: he is hardly through the gateway when Cavendish comes hurtling across the courtyard. ‘Master Cromwell! Yesterday the king –’

  ‘Calmly, George,’ he advises.

  ‘– yesterday he sent us four cartloads of furnishings – come and see! Tapestry, plate, bed hangings – was it by your suit?’

  Who knows? He hadn't asked for anything directly. If he had, he'd have been more specific. Not that hanging, but this hanging, which my lord likes; he likes goddesses, rather than virgin martyrs, so away with St Agnes, and let's have Venus in a grove. My lord likes Venetian glassware; take away these battered silver goblets.

  He looks contemptuous as he inspects the new stuff. ‘Only the best for you boys from Putney,’ Wolsey says. ‘It is possible,’ he adds, almost apologising, ‘that what the king appointed for me was not in fact what was sent. That inferior substitutions were made, by inferior persons.’

  ‘That is entirely possible,’ he says.

  ‘Still. Even so. We are more comfortable for it.’

  ‘The difficulty is,’ Cavendish says, ‘we need to move. This whole house needs to be scrubbed out and aired.’

  ‘True,’ the cardinal says. ‘St Agnes, bless her, would be knocked over by the smell of the privies.’

  ‘So will you make suit to the king's council?’

  He sighs. ‘George, what is the point? Listen. I'm not talking to Thomas Howard. I'm not talking to Brandon. I'm talking to him.’

  The cardinal smiles. A fat paternal beam.

  He is surprised – as they thrash out a financial settlement for the cardinal – at Henry's grasp of detail. Wolsey has always said that the king has a fine mind, as quick as his father's, but more comprehensive. The old king grew narrow as he aged; he kept a hard hand on England; there was no nobleman he did not hold by a debt or bond, and he said frankly that if he could not be loved he would be feared. Henry has a different nature, but what is it? Wolsey laughs and says, I should write you a handbook.

  But as he walks in the gardens of the little lodge at Richmond, where the king has allowed him to remove, the cardinal's mind becomes clouded, he talks about prophecies, and about the downfall of the priests of England, which he says is foretold, and will now happen.

  Even if you don't believe i
n omens – and he doesn't, personally – he can see the problem. For if the cardinal is guilty of a crime in asserting his jurisdiction as legate, are not all those clerics, from bishops downwards, who assented to his legacy, also guilty? He can't be the only person who's thinking about this; but mostly, his enemies can't see past the cardinal himself, his vast scarlet presence on the horizon; they fear it will loom up again, ready for revenge. ‘These are bad times for proud prelates,’ says Brandon, when next they meet. He sounds jaunty, a man whistling to keep his courage up. ‘We need no cardinals in this realm.’

  ‘And he,’ the cardinal says, furious, ‘he, Brandon, when he married the king's sister out of hand – when he married her in the first days of her widowhood, knowing the king intended her for another monarch – his head would have been parted from his body, if I, a simple cardinal, had not pleaded for him to the king.’

  I, a simple cardinal.

  ‘And what excuse did Brandon make?’ the cardinal says. ‘“Oh, Your Majesty, your sister Mary cried. How she did cry and beg me to marry her myself! I never saw woman cry so!” So he dried her tears and got himself up to a dukedom! And now he talks as if he's held his title since the Garden of Eden. Listen, Thomas, if men of sound learning and good disposition come to me – as Bishop Tunstall comes, as Thomas More comes – and plead that the church must be reformed, why then I listen. But Brandon! To talk about proud prelates! What was he? The king's horsekeeper! And I've known horses with more wit.’

  ‘My lord,’ Cavendish pleads, ‘be more temperate. And Charles Brandon, you know, was of an ancient family, a gentleman born.’

  ‘Gentleman, he? A swaggering braggart. That's Brandon.’ The cardinal sits down, exhausted. ‘My head aches,’ he says. ‘Cromwell, go to court and bring me better news.’

  Day by day he takes his instructions from Wolsey at Richmond, and rides to wherever the king is. He thinks of the king as a terrain into which he must advance, with no sea coast to supply him.

  He understands what Henry has learned from his cardinal: his floating diplomacy, his science of ambiguity. He sees how the king has applied this science to the slow, trackless, dubious ruin of his minister. Every kindness, Henry matches with a cruelty, some further charge or forfeiture. Till the cardinal moans, ‘I want to go away.’

  ‘Winchester,’ he suggests, to the dukes. ‘My lord cardinal is willing to proceed to his palace there.’

  ‘What, so near the king?’ Brandon says. ‘We are not fools to ourselves, Master Cromwell.’

  Since he, the cardinal's man, is with Henry so often, rumours have run all over Europe that Wolsey is about to be recalled. The king is cutting a deal, people say, to have the church's wealth in exchange for Wolsey's return to favour. Rumours leak from the council chamber, from the privy chamber: the king does not like his new set-up. Norfolk is found ignorant; Suffolk is accused of having an annoying laugh.

  He says, ‘My lord won't go north. He is not ready for it.’

  ‘But I want him north,’ Howard says. ‘Tell him to go. Tell him Norfolk says he must be on the road and out of here. Or – and tell him this – I will come where he is, and I will tear him with my teeth.’

  ‘My lord.’ He bows. ‘May I substitute the word “bite”?’

  Norfolk approaches him. He stands far too close. His eyes are bloodshot. Every sinew is jumping. He says, ‘Substitute nothing, you misbegotten –’ The duke stabs a forefinger into his shoulder. ‘You … person,’ he says; and again, ‘you nobody from Hell, you whore-spawn, you cluster of evil, you lawyer.’

  He stands there, pushing away, like a baker pressing the dimples into a batch of manchet loaves. Cromwell flesh is firm, dense and impermeable. The ducal finger just bounces off.

  Before they left Esher, one of the cats that had been brought in to kill the vermin gave birth to a litter in the cardinal's own rooms. What presumption, in an animal! But wait – new life, in the cardinal's suite? Could that be an omen? One day, he fears, there will be an omen of another sort: a dead bird will fall down that smoking chimney, and then – oh, woe is us! – he'll never hear the last of it.

  But for the while the cardinal is amused, and puts the kittens on a cushion in an open chest, and watches as they grow. One of them is black and hungry, with a coat like wool and yellow eyes. When it is weaned he brings it home. He takes it from under his coat, where it has been sleeping curled against his shoulder. ‘Gregory, look.’ He holds it out to his son. ‘I am a giant, my name is Marlinspike.’

  Gregory looks at him, wary, puzzled. His glance flinches; his hand pulls away. ‘The dogs will kill it,’ he says.

  Marlinspike goes down to the kitchen, to grow stout and live out his beastly nature. There is a summer ahead, though he cannot imagine its pleasures; sometimes when he's walking in the garden he sees him, a half-grown cat, lolling watchful in an apple tree, or snoring on a wall in the sun.

  Spring 1530: Antonio Bonvisi, the merchant, invites him to supper at his fine tall house on Bishopsgate. ‘I won't be late,’ he tells Richard, expecting that it will be the usual tense gathering, everyone cross and hungry: for even a rich Italian with an ingenious kitchen cannot find a hundred ways with smoked eel or salt cod. The merchants in Lent miss their mutton and malmsey, their nightly grunt in a featherbed with wife or mistress; from now till Ash Wednesday their knives will be out for some cut-throat intelligence, some mean commercial advantage.

  But it is a grander occasion than he thought; the Lord Chancellor is there, amongst a company of lawyers and aldermen. Humphrey Monmouth, whom More once locked up, is seated well away from the great man; More looks at his ease, holding the company captive with one of his stories about that great scholar Erasmus, his dear friend. But when he looks up and sees him, Cromwell, he falls silent halfway through a sentence; he casts his eyes down, and an opaque and stony look grows on his face.

  ‘Did you want to talk about me?’ he asks. ‘You can do it while I'm here, Lord Chancellor. I have a thick skin.’ He knocks back a glass of wine and laughs. ‘Do you know what Brandon is saying? He can't fit my life together. My travels. The other day he called me a Jewish peddler.’

  ‘And was that to your face?’ his host asks politely.

  ‘No. The king told me. But then my lord cardinal calls Brandon a horsekeeper.’

  Humphrey Monmouth says, ‘You have the entrée these days, Thomas. And what do you think, now you are a courtier?’

  There are smiles around the table. Because, of course, the idea is so ridiculous, the situation so temporary. More's people are city people, no grander; but he is sui generis, a scholar and a wit. And More says, ‘Perhaps we should not press the point. There are delicate issues here. There is a time to be silent.’

  An elder of the drapers' guild leans across the table and warns, his voice low: ‘Thomas More said, when he took his seat, that he won't discuss the cardinal, or the Lady either.’

  He, Cromwell, looks around at the company. ‘The king surprises me, though. What he will tolerate.’

  ‘From you?’ More says.

  ‘I mean Brandon. They're going to hunt: he walks in and shouts, are you ready?’

  ‘Your master the cardinal found it a constant battle,’ Bonvisi says, ‘in the early years of the reign. To stop the king's companions becoming too familiar with him.’

  ‘He wanted only himself to be familiar,’ More suggests.

  ‘Though, of course, the king may raise up whom he will.’

  ‘Up to a point, Thomas,’ Bonvisi says; there is some laughter.

  ‘And the king enjoys his friendships. That is good, surely?’

  ‘A soft word, from you, Master Cromwell.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Monmouth says. ‘Master Cromwell is known as one who does everything for his friends.’

  ‘I think …’ More stops; he looks down at the table. ‘In all truth, I am not sure if one can regard a prince as a friend.’

  ‘But surely,’ Bonvisi says, ‘you've known Henry since he was a child.’


  ‘Yes, but friendship should be less exhausting … it should be restorative. Not like …’ More turns to him, for the first time, as if inviting comment. ‘I sometimes feel it is like … like Jacob wrestling with the angel.’

  ‘And who knows,’ he says, ‘what that fight was about?’

  ‘Yes, the text is silent. As with Cain and Abel. Who knows?’

  He senses a little disquiet around the table, among the more pious, the less sportive; or just those keen for the next course. What will it be? Fish!

  ‘When you speak to Henry,’ More says, ‘I beg you, speak to the good heart. Not the strong will.’

  He would pursue it, but the aged draper waves for more wine, and asks him, ‘How's your friend Stephen Vaughan? What's new in Antwerp?’ The conversation is about trade then; it is about shipping, interest rates; it is no more than a background hum to unruly speculation. If you come into a room and say, this is what we're not talking about, it follows that you're talking about nothing else. If the Lord Chancellor weren't here it would be just import duties and bonded warehouses; we would not be thinking of the brooding scarlet cardinal, and our starved Lenten minds would not be occupied by the image of the king's fingers creeping over a resistant, quick-breathing and virginal bosom. He leans back and fixes his gaze on Thomas More. In time there is a natural pause in conversation, a lull; and after a quarter-hour in which he has not spoken, the Lord Chancellor breaks into it, his voice low and angry, his eyes on the remnants of what he has eaten. ‘The Cardinal of York,’ he says, ‘has a greed that will never be appeased, for ruling over other men.’

  ‘Lord Chancellor,’ Bonvisi says, ‘you are looking at your herring as if you hate it.’

  Says the gracious guest, ‘There's nothing wrong with the herring.’

  He leans forward, ready for this fight; he means not to let it pass. ‘The cardinal is a public man. So are you. Should he shrink from a public role?’

  ‘Yes.’ More looks up. ‘Yes, I think, a little, he should. A little less evident appetite, perhaps.’