by Hilary Mante
‘It may be the belief in your country, madam, that a pastor should have a wife, but not here. Did Dr Cranmer not warn you of this?’
‘Please,’ Cranmer begs, ‘tell me what she is saying. Does she blame me? Is she wishing herself at home?’
‘No. No, she says you are kind. What took hold of you, man?’
‘I told you I had a secret.’
So you did. Down the side of the page. ‘But to keep her here, under the king's nose?’
‘I have kept her in the country. But I could not refuse her wish to see the celebrations.’
‘She has been out on the streets?’
‘Why not? No one knows her.’
True. The protection of the stranger in the city; one young woman in a cheerful cap and gown, one pair of eyes among the thousands of eyes: you can hide a tree in a forest. Cranmer approaches him. He holds out his hands, so lately smeared with the sacred oil; fine hands, long fingers, the pale rectangles of his palms crossed and recrossed by news of sea voyages and alliances. ‘I asked you here as my friend. For I count you my chief friend, Cromwell, in this world.’
So there is nothing to do, in friendship, but to take these bony digits in his own. ‘Very well. We will find a way. We will keep your lady secret. I only wonder that you did not leave her with her own family, till we can turn the king our way.’
Margarete is watching them, blue eyes flitting from face to face. She stands up. She pushes the table away from her; he watches her do it, and his heart lurches. Because he has seen a woman do this before, his own wife, and he has seen how she puts her palms down on the surface, to haul herself up. Margarete is tall, and the bulge of her belly juts above the table top.
‘Jesus,’ he says.
‘I hope for a daughter,’ the archbishop says.
‘About when?’ he asks Margarete.
Instead of answering, she takes his hand. She places it on her belly, pressing it down with her own. At one with the celebrations, the child is dancing: spanoletta, Estampie Royal. This is a perhaps a foot; this is a fist. ‘You need a friend,’ he says. ‘A woman with you.’
Cranmer follows him as he pounds out of the room. ‘About John Frith …’ he says.
‘What?’
‘Since he was brought to Croydon, I have seen him three times in private conversation. A worthy young man, a most gentle creature. I have spent hours, I regret not a second of it, but I cannot turn him from his path.’
‘He should have run into the woods. That was his path.’
‘We do not all …’ Cranmer drops his gaze. ‘Forgive me, but we do not all see as many paths as you.’
‘So you must hand him to Stokesley now, because he was taken in Stokesley's diocese.’
‘I never thought, when the king gave me this dignity, when he insisted I occupy this seat, that among my first actions would be to come against a young man like John Frith, and to try to argue him out of his faith.’
Welcome to this world below. ‘I cannot much longer delay,’ Cranmer says.
‘Nor can your wife.’
The streets around Austin Friars are almost deserted. Bonfires are starting up across the city, and the stars are obscured by smoke. His guards are on the gate: sober, he is pleased to note. He stops for a word; there is an art to being in a hurry but not showing it. Then he walks in and says, ‘I want Mistress Barre.’
Most of his household have gone to see the bonfires, and they will be out till midnight, dancing. They have permission to do this; who should celebrate the new queen, if they do not? John Page comes out: something want doing, sir? William Brabazon, pen in hand, one of Wolsey's old crew: the king's business never stops. Thomas Avery, fresh from his accounts: there's always money flowing in, money flowing out. When Wolsey fell, his household deserted him, but Thomas Cromwell's servants stayed to see him through.
A door bangs overhead. Rafe comes down, boots clattering, hair sticking up. He looks flushed and confused. ‘Sir?’
‘I don't want you. Is Helen here, do you know?’
‘Why?’
At that moment Helen appears. She is fastening up her hair under a clean cap. ‘I need you to pack a bag and come with me.’
‘For how long, sir?’
‘I cannot say.’
‘To go out of London?’
He thinks, I'll make some arrangement, the wives and daughters of men in the city, discreet women, they will find her servants, and a midwife, some competent woman who will put Cranmer's child into his hands. ‘Perhaps for a short time.’
‘The children –’
‘We will take care of your children.’
She nods. Speeds away. You wish you had men in your service as swift as she. Rafe calls after her. ‘Helen …’ He looks irate. ‘Where is she going, sir? You can't just drag her off into the night.’
‘Oh, I can,’ he says mildly.
‘I need to know.’
‘Believe me, you don't.’ He relents. ‘Or if you do, this is not the time – Rafe, I'm tired. I'm not going to argue.’
He could perhaps leave it to Christophe, and some of the more unquestioning members of his household, to take Helen from the warmth of Austin Friars to the chill of the abbey precincts; or he could leave it till the morning. But his mind is alive to the loneliness of Cranmer's wife, the strangeness of the city en fête, the deserted aspect of Cannon Row, where even in the shadow of the abbey robbers are bound to lurk. Even in the time of King Richard the district was home to gangs of thieves, who issued out by night at their pleasure, and when the dawn came swarmed back to claim the privilege of sanctuary, and no doubt to share the spoils with the clergy. I shall clean out that lot, he thinks. My men will be after them like ferrets down a hole.
Midnight: stone exhales a mossy breath, flagstones are slippery with the city's exhalations. Helen puts her hand into his. A servant admits them, eyes downcast; he slips him a coin to raise his eyes no higher. No sign of the archbishop: good. A lamp is lit. A door pushed ajar. Cranmer's wife is lying in a little cot. He says to Helen, ‘Here is a lady who needs your compassion. You see her situation. She does not speak English. In any case, you need not ask her name.’
‘Here is Helen,’ he says. ‘She has two children of her own. She will help you.’
Mistress Cranmer, her eyes closed, merely nods and smiles. But when Helen places a gentle hand on her, she reaches out and strokes it.
‘Where is your husband?’
‘Er betet.’
‘I hope he is praying for me.’
The day of Frith's burning he is hunting with the king over the country outside Guildford. It is raining before dawn, a gusty, tugging wind bending the treetops: raining all over England, soaking the crops in the fields. Henry's mood is not to be dented. He sits down to write to Anne, left back at Windsor. After he has twirled his quill in his fingers, turned his paper about and about, he loses the will: you write it for me, Cromwell. I'll tell you what to put.
A tailor's apprentice is going to the stake with Frith: Andrew Hewitt.
Katherine used to have relics brought to her, Henry says, for when she was in labour with her children. A girdle of the Blessed Virgin. I hired it.
I don't think the queen will want that.
And special prayers to St Margaret. These are women's things.
Best left to them, sir.
Later he will hear that Frith and the boy suffered, the wind blowing the flames away from them repeatedly. Death is a japester; call him and he will not come. He is a joker and he lurks in the dark, a black cloth over his face.
There are cases of the sweat in London. The king, who embodies all his people, has all the symptoms every day.
Now Henry stares at the rain falling. Cheering himself up, he says, it may abate, Jupiter is rising. Now, tell her, tell the queen …
He waits, his pen poised.
No, that's enough. Give it to me, Thomas, I will sign it.
He waits to see if the king will draw a heart. But the frivolities of
courtship are over. Marriage is a serious business. Henricus Rex.
I think I have a stomach cramp, the king says. I think I have a headache. I feel queasy, and there are black spots before my eyes, that's a sign, isn't it?
If Your Majesty will rest a little, he says. And take courage.
You know what they say about the sweat. Merry at breakfast, dead by dinner. But do you know it can kill you in two hours?
He says, I have heard that some people die of fear.
By afternoon the sun is struggling out. Henry, laughing, spurs away his hunter under the dripping trees. At Smithfield Frith is being shovelled up, his youth, his grace, his learning and his beauty: a compaction of mud, grease, charred bone.
The king has two bodies. The first exists within the limits of his physical being; you can measure it, and often Henry does, his waist, his calf, his other parts. The second is his princely double, free-floating, untethered, weightless, which may be in more than one place at a time. Henry may be hunting in the forest, while his princely double makes laws. One fights, one prays for peace. One is wreathed in the mystery of his kingship: one is eating a duckling with sweet green peas.
The Pope now says his marriage to Anne is void. He will excommunicate him if he does not return to Katherine. Christendom will slough him off, body and soul, and his subjects will rise up and eject him, into ignominy, exile; no Christian hearth will shelter him, and when he dies his corpse will be dug with animal bones into a common pit.
He has taught Henry to call the Pope ‘The Bishop of Rome’. To laugh when his name is mentioned. If it is uncertain laughter, it is better than his former genuflection.
Cranmer has invited the prophetess, Elizabeth Barton, to a meeting at his house in Kent. She has seen a vision of Mary, the former princess, as queen? Yes. Of Gertrude, Lady Exeter, as queen? Yes. He says gently, both cannot be true. The Maid says, I only report what I see. He writes that she is bouncing and full of confidence; she is used to dealing with archbishops, and she takes him for another Warham, hanging on her every word.
She is a mouse under the cat's paw.
Queen Katherine is on the move, her household much reduced, to the Bishop of Lincoln's palace at Buckden, an old red-brick house with a great hall and gardens that run out into copses and fields and so into the fenland landscape. September will bring her the first fruits of autumn, as October will bring the mists.
The king demands that Katherine give up for his coming child the robes in which the child Mary was christened. When he hears Katherine's answer, he, Thomas Cromwell, laughs. Nature wronged Katherine, he says, in not making her a man; she would have surpassed all the heroes of antiquity. A paper is put before her, in which she is addressed as ‘Princess Dowager’; shocked, they show him how her pen has ripped through it, as she scores out the new title.
Rumours crop in the short summer nights. Dawn finds them like mushrooms in the damp grass. Members of Thomas Cromwell's household have been seeking a midwife in the small hours of the morning. He is hiding a woman at some country house of his, a foreign woman who has given him a daughter. Whatever you do, he says to Rafe, don't defend my honour. I have women like that all over the place.
They will believe it, Rafe says. The word in the city is that Thomas Cromwell has a prodigious …
Memory, he says. I have a very large ledger. A huge filing system, in which are recorded (under their name, and also under their offence) the details of people who have cut across me.
All the astrologers say that the king will have a son. But you are better not to deal with these people. A man came to him, months ago, offering to make the king a philosopher's stone, and when he was told to make himself scarce he turned rude and contrary, as these alchemists do, and now gives it out that the king will die this year. Waiting in Saxony, he says, is the eldest son of the late King Edward. You thought him a rattling skeleton beneath the pavements of the Tower, only his murderers know where: you are deceived, for he is a man grown, and ready to claim his kingdom.
He counts it up: King Edward V, were he living, would be sixty-four this November coming. He's a bit late to the fight, he says.
He puts the alchemist in the Tower, to rethink his position.
No more from Paris. Whatever Maître Guido's up to, he's very quiet about it.
Hans Holbein says, Thomas, I've got your hands done but I haven't paid much attention to your face. I promise this autumn I'll finish you off.
Suppose within every book there is another book, and within every letter on every page another volume constantly unfolding; but these volumes take no space on the desk. Suppose knowledge could be reduced to a quintessence, held within a picture, a sign, held within a place which is no place. Suppose the human skull were to become capacious, spaces opening inside it, humming chambers like beehives.
Lord Mountjoy, Katherine's Chamberlain, has sent him a list of all the necessities for the confinement of a Queen of England. It amuses him, the smooth and civil handover; the court and its ceremonies roll on, whoever the personnel, but it is clear Lord Mountjoy takes him as the man in charge of everything now.
He goes down to Greenwich and refurbishes the apartments, ready for Anne. Proclamations (undated) are prepared, to go out to the people of England and the rulers of Europe, announcing the birth of a prince. Just leave a little gap, he suggests, at the end of ‘prince’, so if need be you can squash in … But they look at him as if he's a traitor, so he leaves off.
When a woman withdraws to give birth the sun may be shining but the shutters of her room are closed so she can make her own weather. She is kept in the dark so she can dream. Her dreams drift her far away, from terra firma to a marshy tract of land, to a landing stage, to a river where a mist closes over the further bank, and earth and sky are inseparate; there she must embark towards life and death, a muffled figure in the stern directing the oars. In this vessel prayers are said that men never hear. Bargains are struck between a woman and her God. The river is tidal, and between one feather-stroke and the next, her tide may turn.
On 26 August 1533, a procession escorts the queen to her sealed rooms at Greenwich. Her husband kisses her, adieu and bon voyage, and she neither smiles nor speaks. She is very pale, very grand, a tiny jewelled head balanced on the swaying tent of her body, her steps small and circumspect, a prayer book in her hands. On the quay she turns her head: one lingering glance. She sees him; she sees the archbishop. One last look and then, her women steadying her elbows, she puts her foot into the boat.
Chapter II.
Devil's Spit.
Autumn and winter 1533
It is magnificent. At the moment of impact, the king's eyes are open, his body braced for the atteint; he takes the blow perfectly, its force absorbed by a body securely armoured, moving in the right direction, moving at the right speed. His colour does not alter. His voice does not shake.
‘Healthy?’ he says. ‘Then I thank God for his favour to us. As I thank you, my lords, for this comfortable intelligence.’
He thinks, Henry has been rehearsing. I suppose we all have.
The king walks away towards his own rooms. Says over his shoulder, ‘Call her Elizabeth. Cancel the jousts.’
A bleat from a Boleyn: ‘The other ceremonies as planned?’
No reply. Cranmer says, all as planned, till we hear different. I am to stand godfather to the … the princess. He falters. He can hardly believe it. For himself, he ordered a daughter, and he got a daughter. His eyes follow Henry's retreating back. ‘He did not ask after the queen. He did not ask how she does.’
‘It hardly matters, does it?’ Edward Seymour, saying brutally what everyone is thinking.
Then Henry, on his long solitary walk, stops, turns back. ‘My lord archbishop. Cromwell. But you only.’
In Henry's closet: ‘Had you imagined this?’
Some would smile. He does not. The king drops into a chair. The urge arises to put a hand on his shoulder, as one does for any inconsolable being. He resists it; sim
ply folds his fingers, protectively, into the fist which holds the king's heart. ‘One day we will make a great marriage for her.’
‘Poor scrap. Her own mother will wish her away.’
‘Your Majesty is young enough,’ Cranmer says. ‘The queen is strong and her family are fertile. You can get another child soon. And perhaps God intends some peculiar blessing by this princess.’
‘My dear friend, I am sure you are right.’ Henry sounds dubious, but he looks around to take strength from his surroundings, as if God might have left some friendly message written on the wall: though there is only precedent for the hostile kind. He takes a breath and stands up and shakes out his sleeves. He smiles: and one can catch in flight, as if it were a bird with a strong-beating heart, the act of will that transforms a desolate wretch into the beacon of his nation.
He whispers to Cranmer later, ‘It was like watching Lazarus get up.’
Soon Henry is striding about the palace at Greenwich, putting the celebrations under way. We are young enough, he says, and next time it will be a boy. One day we will make a great marriage for her. Believe me, God intends some peculiar blessing by this princess.
Boleyn faces brighten. It's Sunday, four in the afternoon. He goes and laughs a bit at the clerks who have ‘prince’ written on their proclamations, and who now have to squeeze extra letters in, then he goes back to working out the expenses for the new princess's household. He has advised that Gertrude, Lady Exeter, be among the child's godparents. Why should only the Maid have a vision of her? It will do her good to be seen by the whole court, smiling a forced smile and holding Anne's baby at the font.
* * *
The Maid herself, brought to London, is kept in a private house, where the beds are soft and the voices around her, the voices of Cromwell women, hardly disturb her prayers; where the key is turned in the oiled lock with a click as small as the snap of a bird's bone. ‘Does she eat?’ he asks Mercy, and she says, she eats as heartily as you: well, no, Thomas, perhaps not quite so heartily as you.
