by Hilary Mante
‘He can keep the style. We'll give him something to live on.’
‘Is this because of the cardinal?’
Harry Percy stopped Wolsey at Cawood, as he was riding south. He came in, keys in his hand, spattered with mud from the road: my lord, I arrest you for high treason. Look at my face, the cardinal said: I am not afraid of any man alive.
He shrugs. ‘Gregory, go and play. Take Bella and practise your French with her; she came to me from Lady Lisle in Calais. I won't be long. I have to settle the kingdom's bills.’
For Ireland at the next dispatch, brass cannon and iron shot, rammers and charging ladles, serpentine powder and four hundredweight of brimstone, five hundred yew bows and two barrels of bowstrings, two hundred each of spades, shovels, crowbars, pickaxes, horsehides, one hundred felling axes, one thousand horseshoes, eight thousand nails. The goldsmith Cornelys has not been paid for the cradle he made for the king's last child, the one that never saw the light; he claims for twenty shillings disbursed to Hans for painting Adam and Eve on the cradle, and he is owed for white satin, gold tassels and fringes, and the silver for modelling the apples in the garden of Eden.
He is talking to people in Florence about hiring a hundred arquebusiers for the Irish campaign. They don't down tools, like Englishmen do, if they have to fight in the woods or on rocky terrain.
The king says, a lucky new year to you, Cromwell. And more to follow. He thinks, luck has nothing to do with it. Of all his presents, Henry is most pleased with the Queen of Sheba, and with a unicorn's horn, and a device to squeeze oranges with a great gold ‘H’ on it.
Early in the new year the king gives him a title no one has ever held before: Vicegerent in Spirituals, his deputy in church affairs. Rumours that the religious houses will be put down have been running about the kingdom for three years and more. Now he has the power to visit, inspect and reform monasteries; to close them, if need be. There is hardly an abbey whose affairs he does not know, by virtue of his training under the cardinal and the letters that arrive day by day – some monks complaining of abuses and scandals and their superiors' disloyalty, others seeking offices within their communities, assuring him that a word in the right quarter will leave them forever in his debt.
He says to Chapuys, ‘Were you ever at the cathedral in Chartres? You walk the labyrinth,’ he says, ‘set into the pavement, and it seems there is no sense in it. But if you follow it faithfully it leads you straight to the centre. Straight to where you should be.’
Officially, he and the ambassador are barely on speaking terms. Unofficially, Chapuys sends him a vat of good olive oil. He retaliates with capons. The ambassador himself arrives, followed by a retainer carrying a parmesan cheese.
Chapuys looks doleful and chilly. ‘Your poor queen keeps the season meagrely at Kimbolton. She is so afraid of the heretic councillors about her husband that she has all her food cooked over the fire in her own room. And Kimbolton is more like a stable than a house.’
‘Nonsense,’ he says briskly. He hands the ambassador a warming glass of spiced wine. ‘We only moved her from Buckden because she complained it was damp. Kimbolton is a very good house.’
‘Ah, you say that because it has thick walls and a wide moat.’ The scent of honey and cinnamon wafts into the room, logs crackle in the hearth, the green boughs decorating his hall diffuse their own resinous scent. ‘And the Princess Mary is ill.’
‘Oh, the Lady Mary is always ill.’
‘The more cause to care for her!’ But Chapuys softens his tone. ‘If her mother could see her, it would be much comfort to them both.’
‘Much comfort to their escape plans.’
‘You are a heartless man.’ Chapuys sips his wine. ‘You know, the Emperor is ready to stand your friend.’ A pause, heavy with significance; into which, the ambassador sighs. ‘There are rumours that La Ana is distraught. That Henry is looking at another lady.’
He takes a breath and begins to talk. Henry has no time for other women. He is too busy counting his money. He is growing very close, he doesn't want Parliament to know his income. I have difficulty getting him to part with anything for the universities, or to pay his builders, or even for the poor. He only thinks of ordnance. Munitions. Shipbuilding. Beacons. Forts.
Chapuys turns down his mouth. He knows when he's being spun a line; if he didn't, where would be the pleasure in it? ‘So I am to tell my master, am I, that the King of England is so set on war he has no time for love?’
‘There will be no war unless your master makes it. Which, with the Turks at his heels, he scarcely has time to do. Oh, I know his coffers are bottomless. The Emperor could ruin us all if he liked.’ He smiles. ‘But what good would that do the Emperor?’
The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman's sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rosewater; her hand pulling close the bed curtain, the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh. The king – lord of generalities – must now learn to labour over detail, led on by intelligent greed. As his prudent father's son, he knows all the families of England and what they have. He has registered their holdings in his head, down to the last watercourse and copse. Now the church's assets are to come under his control, he needs to know their worth. The law of who owns what – the law generally – has accreted a parasitic complexity – it is like a barnacled hull, a roof slimy with moss. But there are lawyers enough, and how much ability does it require, to scrape away as you are directed? Englishmen may be superstitious, they may be afraid of the future, they may not know what England is; but the skills of adding and subtraction are not scarce. Westminster has a thousand scratching pens, but Henry will need, he thinks, new men, new structures, new thinking. Meanwhile he, Cromwell, puts his commissioners on the road. Valor ecclesiasticus. I will do it in six months, he says. Such an exercise has never been attempted before, it is true, but he has already done much that no one else has even dreamed of.
One day at the beginning of spring he comes back from Westminster chilled. His face aches, as if his bones lie open to the weather, and nagging at his memory is that day when his father mashed him into the cobblestones: his sideways view of Walter's boot. He wants to get back to Austin Friars, because he has had stoves installed and the whole house is warm; the Chancery Lane house is only warm in patches. Besides, he wants to be behind his wall.
Richard says, ‘Your eighteen-hour days, sir, can't continue for ever.’
‘The cardinal did them.’
That night in his sleep he goes down to Kent. He is looking over the accounts of Bayham Abbey, which is to be closed by Wolsey's command. The hostile faces of the monks, hovering over him, cause him to swear and say to Rafe, pack these ledgers and get them on the mule, we'll examine them over our supper and a glass of white burgundy. It is high summer. On horseback, the mule plodding after them, they pick a route through the monastery's neglected vineyards, dipping with the track into a sylvan dimness, into the bowl of broad-leaved green at the valley bottom. He says to Rafe, we are like two caterpillars sliding through a salad. They ride out again into a flood of sunlight, and before them is the tower of Scotney Castle: its sandstone walls, gold stippled with grey, shimmer above its moat.
He wakes. He has dreamed of Kent, or been there? The ripple of the sunshine is still on his skin. He calls for Christophe.
Nothing happens. He lies still. No one comes. It is early: no sound from the house below. The shutters are closed, and the stars are struggling to get in, working themselves with steel points into the splinters of the wood. It occurs to him that he has not really called for Christophe, only dreamed he has.
Gregory's many tutors have presented him with a sheaf of bills. The cardinal stands at the foot of his bed, wearing his full pontificals. The cardinal becomes Christophe, opening the shutter,
moving against the light. ‘You have a fever, master?’
Surely he knows, one way or the other? Have I to do everything, know everything? ‘Oh, it is the Italian one,’ he says, as if that discounts it.
‘So must we fetch an Italian doctor?’ Christophe sounds dubious.
Rafe is here. The whole household is here. Charles Brandon is here, who he thinks is real, till Morgan Williams comes in, who is dead, and William Tyndale, who is in the English House at Antwerp and dare not venture. On the stairs he can hear the efficient, deathly clip of his father's steel-tipped boots.
Richard Cromwell roars, can we have quiet in here? When he roars, he sounds Welsh; he thinks, on an ordinary day I would never have noticed that. He closes his eyes. Ladies move behind his lids: transparent like little lizards, lashing their tails. The serpent queens of England, black-fanged and haughty, dragging their blood-soaked linen and their crackling skirts. They kill and eat their own children; this is well-known. They suck their marrow before they are even born.
Someone asks him if he wants to confess.
‘Must I?’
‘Yes, sir, or you will be thought a sectary.’
But my sins are my strength, he thinks; the sins I have done, that others have not even found the opportunity of committing. I hug them close; they're mine. Besides, when I come to judgment I mean to come with a memorandum in my hand: I shall say to my Maker, I have fifty items here, possibly more.
‘If I must confess, I'll have Rowland.’
Bishop Lee is in Wales, they tell him. It might take days.
Dr Butts comes, with other doctors, a swarm of them sent by the king. ‘It is a fever I got in Italy,’ he explains.
‘Let's say it is.’ Butts frowns down at him.
‘If I am dying, get Gregory. I have things to tell him. But if I am not, don't interrupt his studies.’
‘Cromwell,’ Butts says, ‘I couldn't kill you if I shot you through with cannon. The sea would refuse you. A shipwreck would wash you up.’
They talk about his heart; he overhears them. He feels they should not: the book of my heart is a private book, it is not an order book left on the counter for any passing clerk to scrawl in. They give him a draught to swallow. Shortly afterwards he returns to his ledgers. The lines keep slipping and the figures intermingling and as soon as he has totalled up one column the total unmakes itself and all sense is subtracted. But he keeps trying and trying and adding and adding, until the poison or the healing draught loosens its grip on him and he wakes. The pages of the ledgers are still before his eyes. Butts thinks he is resting as ordered, but in the privacy of his mind little stick figures with arms and legs of ink climb out of the ledgers and walk about. They are carrying firewood in for the kitchen range, but the venison that is trussed to butcher turns back into deer, who rub themselves in innocence on the bark of the trees. The songbirds for the fricassee refeather themselves, hopping back on to the branches not yet cut for firewood, and the honey for basting has gone back to the bee, and the bee has gone back to the hive. He can hear the noises of the house below, but it is some other house, in another country: the chink of coins changing hands, and the scrape of wooden chests over a stone floor. He can hear his own voice, telling some story in Tuscan, in Putney, in the French of the camp and the Latin of a barbarian. Perhaps this is Utopia? At the centre of that place, which is an island, there is a place called Amaurotum, the City of Dreams.
He is tired out from the effort of deciphering the world. Tired from the effort of smiling at the foe.
Thomas Avery comes up from the counting house. He sits by him and holds his hand. Hugh Latimer comes and says psalms. Cranmer comes and looks at him dubiously. Perhaps he is afraid that he will ask, in his fever, how is your wife Grete these days?
Christophe says to him, ‘I wish your old master the cardinal were here to comfort you, sir. He was a comfortable man.’
‘What do you know of him?’
‘I robbed him, sir. Did you not know? I robbed his gold plate.’
He struggles to sit up. ‘Christophe? You were the boy at Compiègne?’
‘Certainly it was me. Up and down the stairs with buckets of hot water for the bath, and each time a gold cup in the empty bucket. I was sorry to rob him, for he was so gentil. “What, you again with your pail, Fabrice?” You must understand, Fabrice was my name in Compiègne. “Give this poor child his dinner,” he said. I tasted apricots, which I never had before.’
‘But did they not catch you?’
‘My master was caught, a very great thief. They branded him. There was a hue and cry. But you see, master, I was meant for greater fortune.’
I remember, he says, I remember Calais, the alchemists, the memory machine. ‘Guido Camillo is making it for François so he will be the wisest king in the world, but the dolt will never learn how to use it.’
This is fantasy, Butts says, the fever rising, but Christophe says, no, I assure you, there is a man in Paris who has built a soul. It is a building but it is alive. The whole of it is lined with little shelves. On these shelves you find certain parchments, fragments of writing, they are in the nature of keys, which lead to a box which contains a key which contains another key, but these keys are not made of metal, or these enfolded boxes of wood.
Then what, frog-boy? someone says.
They are made of spirit. They are what we shall have left, if all the books are burned. They will enable us to remember not only the past, but the future, and to see all the forms and customs that will one day inhabit the earth.
Butts says, he is burning up. He thinks of Little Bilney, how he put a hand in the candle flame the night before he died, testing out the pain. It seared his shrinking flesh; in the night he whimpered like a child and sucked his raw hand, and in the morning the city councillors of Norwich dragged him to the pit where their forefathers had burned Lollards. Even when his face was burned away, they were still pushing into it the emblems and banners of popery: their fabric singed and fringes alight, their blank-eyed virgins cured like herring and curling in the smoke.
He asks, politely and in several languages, for water. Not too much, Butts says, a little and a little. He has heard of an island called Ormuz, the driest kingdom in the world, where there are no trees and no crop but salt. Stand at its centre, and you look over thirty miles in all directions of ashy plain: beyond which lies the seashore, encrusted with pearls.
His daughter Grace comes by night. She makes her own light, wrapped within her shining hair. She watches him, steady, unblinking, till it is morning, and when they open the shutter the stars are fading and the sun and moon hang together in a pale sky.
A week passes. He is better and he wants work brought in but the doctors forbid it. How will it go forward, he asks, and Richard says, sir, you have trained us all and we are your disciples, you have made a thinking machine that marches forward as if it were alive, you don't need to be tending it every minute of every day.
Still, Christophe says, they say le roi Henri is groaning as if he were in pain himself: oh, where is Cremuel?
A message is brought. Henry has said, I am coming to visit. It's an Italian fever, so I am sure not to take it.
He can hardly believe it. Henry ran away from Anne when she had the sweat: even at the height of his love for her.
He says, send Thurston up. They have been keeping him on a low diet, invalid food like turkey. Now, he says, we are going to plan – what? – a piglet, stuffed and roasted in the way I once saw it done at a papal banquet. You will need chopped chicken, lardo, and a goat's liver, minced fine. You will need fennel seeds, marjoram, mint, ginger, butter, sugar, walnuts, hen's eggs and some saffron. Some people put in cheese but we don't make the right kind here in London, besides I myself think it is unnecessary. If you're in trouble about any of this send out to Bonvisi's cook, he'll see you right.
He says, ‘Send next door to prior George, tell him to keep his friars off the streets when the king comes, lest he reform them too soon.’ It'
s his feeling that the whole process should go slowly, slowly, so people will see the justice of it; no need to spill the religious out on to the streets. The friars who live at his gates are a disgrace to their order, but they are good neighbours to him. They have given up their refectory, and from their chamber windows at night drifts the sound of merry supper parties. Any day you can join a crowd of them drinking at the Well with Two Buckets just outside his gates. The abbey church is more like a market, and a fleshmarket too. The district is full of young bachelors from the Italian merchant houses, who are serving their London year; he often entertains them, and when they leave his table (drained of market information) he knows they make a dash for the friars' precincts, where enterprising London girls are sheltering from the rain and waiting to make amiable terms.
* * *
It is 17 April when the king makes his visit. At dawn there are showers. By ten o'clock the air is mild as buttermilk. He is up and in a chair, from which he rises. My dear Cromwell: Henry kisses him firmly on both cheeks, takes him by the arms and (in case he thinks he is the only strong man in the kingdom) he sits him back, decisively, in his chair. ‘You sit and give me no argument,’ Henry says. ‘Give me no argument for once, Master Secretary.’
The ladies of the house, Mercy and his sister-in-law Johane, are decked out like Walsingham madonnas on a feast day. They curtsey low, and Henry sways above them, informally attired, jacket of silver brocade, vast gold chain across his chest, his fists flashing with Indian emeralds. He has not wholly mastered the family relationships, for which no one can blame him. ‘Master Secretary's sister?’ he says to Johane. ‘No, forgive me. I remember now that you lost your sister Bet at the same time my own lovely sister died.’
It is such a simple, human sentence, coming from a king; at the mention of their most recent loss, tears well into the eyes of the two women, and Henry, turning to one, then the other, with a careful forefinger dots them from their cheeks, and makes them smile. The little brides Alice and Jo he whirls up into the air as if they were butterflies, and kisses them on the mouth, saying he wishes he had known them when he was a boy. The sad truth is, do you not notice, Master Secretary, the older one gets, the lovelier the girls?
