by Hilary Mante
It's possible; maybe they were battle-weary, exhausted. Yet he gives her such magnificent presents. And they quarrel so much. Would they quarrel so much, if they were indifferent?
‘So,’ she goes on, ‘between the kicking and the sore leg, and his lack of prowess, and her lack of desire, it will be a wonder if we ever have a Prince of Wales. Oh, he is good man enough, if he had a new woman each week. If he craves novelty, who is to say she does not? Her own brother is in her service.’
He turns to look at her. ‘God help you, Lady Rochford,’ he says.
‘To fetch his friends her way, I mean. What did you think I meant?’ A little, grating laugh.
‘Do you know what you mean yourself? You have been at court long enough, you know what games are played. It is no matter if any lady receives verses and compliments, even though she is married. She knows her husband writes verses elsewhere.’
‘Oh, she knows that. At least, I know. There is not a minx within thirty miles who has not had a set of Rochford's verses. But if you think the gallantry stops at the bedchamber's door, you are more innocent than I took you for. You may be in love with Seymour's daughter, but you need not emulate her in having the wit of a sheep.’
He smiles. ‘Sheep are maligned in that way. Shepherds say they can recognise each other. They answer to their names. They make friends for life.’
‘And I will tell you who is in and out of everyone's bedchamber, it is that sneaking little boy Mark. He is the go-between for them all. My husband pays him in pearl buttons and comfit boxes and feathers for his hat.’
‘Why, is Lord Rochford short of ready money?’
‘You see an opportunity for usury?’
‘How not?’ At least, he thinks, there is one point on which we concur: pointless dislike of Mark. In Wolsey's house he had duties, teaching the choir children. Here he does nothing but stand about, wherever the court is, in greater or lesser proximity to the queen's apartments. ‘Well, I can see no harm in the boy,’ he says.
‘He sticks like a burr to his betters. He does not know his place. He is a jumped-up nobody, taking his chance because the times are disordered.’
‘I suppose you could say the same of me, Lady Rochford. And I am sure you do.’
Thomas Wyatt brings him baskets of cobnuts and filberts, bushels of Kentish apples, jolting up himself to Austin Friars on the carrier's cart. ‘The venison follows,’ he says, jumping down. ‘I come with the fresh fruit, not the carcases.’ His hair smells of apples, his clothes are dusty from the road. ‘Now you will have words with me,’ he says, ‘for risking a doublet worth –’
‘The carrier's yearly earnings.’
Wyatt looks chastened. ‘I forget you are my father.’
‘I have rebuked you, so now we can fall to idle boyish talk.’ Standing in a wash of chary autumn sun, he holds an apple in his hand. He pares it with a thin blade, and the peel whispers away from the flesh and lies among his papers, like the shadow of an apple, green on white paper and black ink. ‘Did you see Lady Carey when you were in the country?’
‘Mary Boleyn in the country. What dew-fresh pleasures spring to mind. I expect she's rutting in some hayloft.’
‘Just that I want to keep hold of her, for the next time her sister is hors de combat.’
Wyatt sits down amid the files, an apple in his hand. ‘Cromwell, suppose you'd been away from England for seven years? If you'd been like a knight in a story, lying under an enchantment? You would look around you and wonder, who are they, these people?’
This summer, Wyatt vowed, he would stay down in Kent. He would read and write on wet days, hunt when it is fine. But the fall comes, and the nights deepen, and Anne draws him back and back. His heart is true, he believes: and if she is false, it is difficult to pick where the falsehood lies. You cannot joke with Anne these days. You cannot laugh. You must think her perfect, or she will find some way to punish you.
‘My old father talks about King Edward's days. He says, you see now why it's not good for the king to marry a subject, an Englishwoman?’
The trouble is, though Anne has remade the court, there are still people who knew her before, in the days when she came from France, when she set herself to seduce Harry Percy. They compete to tell stories of how she is not worthy. Or not human. How she is a snake. Or a swan. Una candida cerva. One single white doe, concealed in leaves of silver-grey; shivering, she hides in the trees, waiting for the lover who will turn her back from animal to goddess. ‘Send me back to Italy,’ Wyatt says. Her dark, her lustrous, her slanting eyes: she haunts me. She comes to me in my solitary bed at night.
‘Solitary? I don't think so.’
Wyatt laughs. ‘You're right. I take it where I can.’
‘You drink too much. Water your wine.’
‘It could have been different.’
‘Everything could.’
‘You never think about the past.’
‘I never talk about it.’
Wyatt pleads, ‘Send me away somewhere.’
‘I will. When the king needs an ambassador.’
‘Is it true that the Medici have offered for the Princess Mary's hand?’
‘Not Princess Mary, you mean the Lady Mary. I have asked the king to think about it. But they are not grand enough for him. You know, if Gregory showed any interest in banking, I would look for a bride for him in Florence. It would be pleasant to have an Italian girl in the house.’
‘Send me back there. Deploy me where I can be useful, to you or the king, as here I am useless and worse than useless to myself, and necessary to no one's pleasure.’
He says, ‘Oh, by the bleached bones of Becket. Stop feeling sorry for yourself.’
Norfolk has his own view of the queen's friends. He rattles a little while he expresses it, his relics clinking, his grey disordered eyebrows working over wide-open eyes. These men, he says, these men who hang around with women! Norris, I thought better of him! And Henry Wyatt's son! Writing verse. Singing. Talk-talk-talking. ‘What's the use of talking to women?’ he asks earnestly. ‘Cromwell, you don't talk to women, do you? I mean, what would be the topic? What would you find to say?’
I'll speak to Norfolk, he decides when he comes back from France; ask him to incline Anne to caution. The French are meeting the Pope in Marseilles, and in default of his own attendance Henry must be represented by his most senior peer. Gardiner is already there. For me every day is like a holiday, he says to Tom Wyatt, when those two are away.
Wyatt says, ‘I think Henry may have a new interest by then.’
In the days following he follows Henry's eyes, as they rest on various ladies of the court. Nothing in them, perhaps, except the speculative interest of any man; it's only Cranmer who thinks that if you look twice at a woman you have to marry her. He watches the king dancing with Lizzie Seymour, his hand lingering on her waist. He sees Anne watching, her expression cold, pinched.
Next day, he lends Edward Seymour some money on very favourable terms.
In the damp autumn mornings, when it is still half-light, his household are out early, in the damp and dripping woods. You don't get torta di funghi unless you pick the raw ingredients.
Richard Riche arrives at eight o'clock, his face astonished and alarmed. ‘They stopped me at your gate, sir, and said, where's your bag of mushrooms? No one comes in here without mushrooms.’ Riche's dignity is affronted. ‘I don't think they would have asked the Lord Chancellor for mushrooms.’
‘Oh, they would, Richard. But in an hour you will eat them with eggs baked in cream, and the Lord Chancellor will not. Shall we get down to work?’
Through September he has been rounding up the priests and monks who have been close to the Maid. He and Sir Purse sift the papers and conduct the interrogations. The clerics are no sooner under lock and key than they begin to deny her, and deny each other: I never believed in her, it was Father So-and-So who convinced me, I never wanted any trouble. As for their contacts with Exeter's wife, with Katherine, with Ma
ry – each disclaims his own involvement and rushes to implicate his brother-in-Christ. The Maid's people have been in constant contact with the Exeter household. She herself has been at many of the chief monastic houses of the realm – Syon Abbey, the Charterhouse at Sheen, the Franciscan house at Richmond. He knows this because he has many contacts among disaffected monks. In every house there are a few, and he seeks out the most intelligent. Katherine herself has not met the nun. Why should she? She has Fisher to act as a go-between, and Gertrude, Lord Exeter's wife.
The king says, ‘It is hard for me to believe Henry Courtenay would betray me. A Garter knight, a great man in the lists, my friend since I was a boy. Wolsey tried to part us, but I wouldn't have it.’ He laughs. ‘Brandon, do you remember Greenwich, that Christmas, which year was it? Remember the snowball fight?’
This is the whole difficulty of dealing with them, men who are always talking about ancient pedigrees, and boyhood friendships, and things that happened when you were still trading wool on the Antwerp exchange. You put the evidence under their noses, and they start getting teary over snowball fights. ‘Look,’ Henry says, ‘it is Courtenay's wife that is to blame. When he knows the whole of her practices he will want to be rid of her. She is fickle and weak like all her sex, easily led into scheming.’
‘So forgive her,’ he says. ‘Write her a pardon. Put these people under a debt of gratitude to you, if you want them to leave off their foolish sentiment towards Katherine.’
‘You think you can buy hearts?’ Charles Brandon says. He sounds as if he would be sad if the answer were yes.
He thinks, the heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale. ‘It is not a price in money we are offering. I have enough to put the Courtenay family on trial, all Exeter's people. If we forbear to do it, we are offering their freedom and their lands. We are giving them a chance to recoup the honour of their name.’
Henry says, ‘His grandfather left Crookback for my father's service.’
‘If we forgive them they will play us for fools,’ Charles says.
‘I think not, my lord. Everything they do from now on, they do under my eye.’
‘And the Poles, Lord Montague: what do you propose there?’
‘He should not assume he will be pardoned.’
‘Make him sweat, eh?’ Charles says. ‘I am not sure I like your way of dealing with noblemen.’
‘They get their deserts,’ the king says. ‘Hush, my lord, I need to think.’
A pause. Brandon's position is too complicated for him to sustain. He wants to say, pay them out as traitors, Cromwell: but mind you butcher them respectfully. Suddenly his face clears. ‘Ah, now I remember Greenwich. The snow was knee-deep that year. Ah, we were young then, Harry. You don't get snow any more, like you did when we were young.’
He gathers up his papers and begs to be excused. Reminiscence is setting in for the afternoon and there is work to be done. ‘Rafe, ride over to West Horsley. Tell Exeter's wife the king thinks all women fickle and weak – though I should have thought he has plenty of evidence to the contrary. Tell her to set down in writing that she has not the wit of a flea. Tell her to claim she is exceptionally easy to mislead, even for a woman. Tell her to grovel. Advise her on the wording. You know how to do it. Nothing can be too humble for Henry.’
This is the season for humility. The word from the talks in Marseilles is that King Francis has fallen at the Pope's feet and kissed his slippers. When the news comes, Henry bellows an obscenity and shreds the dispatch in his hands.
He collects up the pieces, lays it out on a table and reads it. ‘Francis has kept faith with you after all,’ he says. ‘Surprisingly.’ He has persuaded the Pope to suspend his bull of excommunication. England has a breathing space.
‘I wish Pope Clement in his grave,’ Henry says. ‘God knows he is a man of filthy life, and he is always ailing, so he ought to die. Sometimes,’ he says, ‘I pray that Katherine might be translated into glory. Is that wrong?’
‘If you snap your fingers, Majesty, a hundred priests will come running to tell you right from wrong.’
‘It seems I prefer to hear it from you.’ Henry broods, in a sulky twitching silence. ‘If Clement dies, who will be the next rogue in office?’
‘I've put my money on Alessandro Farnese.’
‘Really?’ Henry sits up. ‘One lays bets?’
‘But the odds are short. He has thrown about such bribes to the Roman mob all these years, that they will put the cardinals in terror when the time comes.’
‘Remind me how many children has he.’
‘Four I know of.’
The king is looking into the tapestry on the near wall, where white-shouldered women walk barefoot on a carpet of spring flowers. ‘I may have another child soon.’
‘The queen has spoken to you?’
‘Not yet.’ But he sees, we all do, the flare of colour in Anne's cheeks, the silk sleekness of her person, the tone of command ringing in her voice as she hands out favours and rewards to the people around her. This last week, there are more rewards than black looks, and Stephen Vaughan's wife, who is in the Bedchamber, says she has missed her courses. The king says, ‘She has missed her …’ and then he stops, blushing like a schoolboy. He crosses the room, flings open his arms and embraces him, shining like a star, his great hands with their blazing rings seizing hand-fuls of the black velvet of his jacket. ‘This time for sure. England is ours.’
Archaic, that cry from his heart: as if he were standing on the battlefield between the bloodied banners, the crown in a thorn bush, his enemies dead at his feet.
He disengages himself gently, smiling. He uncrumples the memorandum he had clenched in his fist when the king seized him; because is that not how men embrace, they knead each other with big fists, as if to knock each other down? Henry squeezes his arm and says, ‘Thomas, it is like hugging a sea wall. What are you made of?’ He takes the paper. He gapes. ‘Is this what we must do this morning? This list?’
‘Not more than fifty items. We shall soon work through.’
For the rest of the day he cannot stop smiling. Who cares for Clement and his bulls? He might as well stand on Cheap and let the populace pelt him. He might as well stand under the Christmas garlands – which we dust with flour in years when there is no snow – and sing, ‘Hey nonny no, Fa-la-la, Under the trees so green-o.’
On a cold day towards the end of November the Maid and half a dozen of her principal supporters do penance at Paul's Cross. They stand shackled and barefoot in a whipping wind. The crowd is large and boisterous, the sermon lively, telling what the Maid did on her night walks when her sisters in religion were sleeping, and what lurid tales of devils she told to keep her followers in awe. Her confession is read out, at the end of which she asks the Londoners to pray for her, and begs for the king's mercy.
You wouldn't know her now, for the bonny girl they had at Lambeth. She looks haggard and ten years older. Not that she has been hurt, he would not countenance that for a woman, and in fact they have all talked without duress; the hard thing has been to stop them complicating the story by rumours and fantasies, so that half England is dragged into it. The one priest who had persistently lied, he had simply locked up with an informer; the man was detained for murder, and in no time at all Father Rich had set about saving his soul and interpreting to him the Maid's prophecies and impressing him with the names of important people he knew at court. Pitiful, really. But it has been necessary to put on this show, and next he will take it to Canterbury, so Dame Elizabeth can confess on her home ground. It is necessary to break the hold of these people who talk of the end times and threaten us with plagues and damnation. It is necessary to dispel the terror they create.
Thomas More is there, jostled among the city dignitaries; he is making towards him now, as the preachers step down and the prisoners are being led from the platform. More rubs his cold hands. He blows on them. ‘Her crime is, she was made use of.’
He thinks, why d
id Alice let you out without your gloves? ‘For all the testimony I have got,’ he says, ‘I still cannot understand how she arrived here, from the edge of the marshes to a public scaffold at Paul's. For sure she made no money out of it.’
‘How will you frame the charges?’ His tone is neutral, interested, lawyer-to-lawyer.
‘The common law does not deal with women who say they can fly, or raise the dead. I shall put an act of attainder into Parliament. Treason charges for the principals. The accessories, life imprisonment, confiscation, fines. The king will be circumspect, I think. Even merciful. I am more interested in unravelling the plans of these people than in exacting penalties. I don't want a trial with scores of defendants and hundreds of witnesses, tying the courts up for years.’
More hesitates.
‘Come on,’ he says, ‘you would have seen them off that way yourself, when you were Chancellor.’
‘You may be right. I am clear anyway.’ A pause. More says, ‘Thomas. In the name of Christ, you know that.’
‘As long as the king knows it. We must keep it firmly in his mind. A letter from you perhaps, enquiring after the princess Elizabeth.’
‘I can do that.’
‘Making it plain you accept her rights and title.’
‘That is not a difficulty. The new marriage is made and must be accepted.’
‘You don't think you could bring yourself to praise it?’
‘Why does the king want other men to praise his wife?’
‘Suppose you were to write an open letter. To say that you have seen the light in the matter of the king's natural jurisdiction over the church.’ He looks across to where the prisoners are being loaded into the waiting carts. ‘They are taking them back to the Tower now.’ He pauses. ‘You mustn't stand about. Come home with me to dinner.’
‘No.’ More shakes his head. ‘I would rather be blown around on the river and go home hungry. If I could trust you only to put food in my mouth – but you will put words into it.’
