by Hilary Mante
Then eighty will have its advantages, he says: every drab will be a pearl. Mercy says to the king, as if talking to a neighbour, give over, sir: you're no age. Henry stretches out his arms and displays himself before the company: ‘Forty-five in July.’
He notes the incredulous hush. It does the job. Henry is gratified.
Henry walks around and looks at all his paintings and asks who the people are. He looks at Anselma, the Queen of Sheba, on the wall. He makes them laugh by picking up Bella and talking to her in Honor Lisle's atrocious French. ‘Lady Lisle sent the queen a little creature even smaller. He tips his head to one side and his ears prick up, as if to say, why are you speaking to me? So she calls him Pourquoi.’ When he speaks of Anne his voice drips uxorious sentiment: like clear honey. The women smile, pleased to see their king set such an example. ‘You know him, Cromwell, you have seen him on her arm. She takes him everywhere. Sometimes,’ and now he nods judiciously, ‘I think she loves him better than me. Yes, I am second to the dog.’
He sits smiling, no appetite, watching as Henry eats from the silver dishes Hans has designed.
Henry speaks kindly to Richard, calling him cousin. He signals for him to stand by while he talks to his councillor, and for others to retreat a little way. What if King Francis this and Francis that, should I cross the sea myself to patch together some sort of deal, would you cross over yourself when you are on your feet again? What if the Irish, what if the Scots, what if it all gets out of hand and we have wars like in Germany and peasants crowning themselves, what if these false prophets, what if Charles overruns me and Katherine takes the field, she is of mettlesome temper and the people love her, God knows why for I do not.
If that happens, he says, I will be out of this chair and take the field, my own sword in my hand.
When the king has enjoyed his dinner he sits by him and talks softly about himself. The April day, fresh and showery, puts him in mind of the day his father died. He talks of his childhood: I lived at the palace at Eltham, I had a fool called Goose. When I was seven the Cornish rebels came up, led by a giant, do you remember that? My father sent me to the Tower to keep me safe. I said, let me out, I want to fight! I wasn't frightened of a giant from the west, but I was frightened of my grandmother Margaret Beaufort, because her face was like a death's head, and her grip on my wrist was like a skeleton's grip.
When we were young, he says, we were always told, your grandmother gave birth to your lord father the king when she was a little creature of thirteen years. Her past was like a sword she held over us. What, Harry, are you laughing in Lent? When I, at little more years than you, gave birth to the Tudor? What, Harry, are you dancing, what, Harry, are you playing at ball? Her life was all duty. She kept twelve paupers in her house at Woking and once she made me kneel down with a basin and wash their yellow feet, she's lucky I didn't throw up on them. She used to start praying every morning at five. When she knelt down at her priedieu she cried out from the pain in her knees. And whenever there was a celebration, a wedding or a birth, a pastime or an occasion of mirth, do you know what she did? Every time? Without failing? She wept.
And with her, it was all Prince Arthur. Her shining light and her creeping saint. ‘When I became king instead, she lay down and died out of spite. And on her deathbed, do you know what she told me?’ Henry snorts. ‘Obey Bishop Fisher in all things! Pity she didn't tell Fisher to obey me!’
When the king has left with his gentlemen, Johane comes to sit with him. They talk quietly; though everything they say is fit to be overheard. ‘Well, it came off sweetly.’
‘We must give the kitchen a present.’
‘The whole household did well. I am glad to have seen him.’
‘Is he what you hoped?’
‘I had not thought him so tender. I see why Katherine has fought so hard for him. I mean, not just to be queen, which she thinks is her right, but to have him for a husband. I would say he is a man very apt to be loved.’
Alice bursts in. ‘Forty-five! I thought he was past that.’
‘You would have bedded him for a handful of garnets,’ Jo sneers. ‘You said so.’
‘Well, you for export licences!’
‘Stop!’ he says. ‘You girls! If your husbands should hear you.’
‘Our husbands know what we are,’ Jo says. ‘We are full of ourselves, aren't we? You don't come to Austin Friars to look for shy little maids. I wonder our uncle doesn't arm us.’
‘Custom constrains me. Or I'd send you to Ireland.’
Johane watches them rampage away. When they are out of earshot, she checks over her shoulder and murmurs, you will not credit what I am going to say next.
‘Try me.’
‘Henry is frightened of you.’
He shakes his head. Who frightens the Lion of England?
‘Yes, I swear to you. You should have seen his face, when you said you would take your sword in your hand.’
The Duke of Norfolk comes to visit him, clattering up from the yard where his servants hold his plumed horse. ‘Liver, is it? My liver's shot to pieces. And these five years my muscles have been wasting. Look at that!’ He sticks out a claw. ‘I've tried every physician in the realm, but they don't know what ails me. Yet they never fail to send in their accounts.’
Norfolk, he knows it for a fact, would never pay anything so mere as a doctor's bill.
‘And the colics and the gripes,’ the duke says, ‘they make my mortal life a Purgatory. Sometimes I'm at stool all night.’
‘Your Grace should take life more easily,’ Rafe says. Not bolt your food, he means. Not race about in a lather like a post horse.
‘I intend to, believe me. My niece makes it clear she wants none of my company and none of my counsel. I'm for my house at Kenninghall, and Henry can find me there if he wants me. God restore you, Master Secretary. St Walter is good, I hear, if a job's getting too much for you. And St Ubald against the headache, he does the trick for me.’ He gropes inside his jacket. ‘Brought you a medal. Pope blessed it. Bishop of Rome, sorry.’ He drops it on the table. ‘Thought you might not have one.’
He is out of the door. Rafe picks up the medal. ‘It's probably cursed.’
On the stairs they can hear the duke, his voice raised, plaintive: ‘I thought he was nearly dead! They told me he was nearly dead …’
He says to Rafe, ‘Seen him off.’
Rafe grins. ‘Suffolk too.’
Henry has never remitted the fine of thirty thousand pounds he imposed when Suffolk married his sister. From time to time he remembers it, and this is one of those times; Brandon has had to give up his lands in Oxfordshire and Berkshire to pay his debts, and now he keeps small state down in the country.
He closes his eyes. It is bliss to think of: two dukes on the run from him.
His neighbour Chapuys comes in. ‘I told my master in dispatches that the king has visited you. My master is amazed that the king would go to a private house, to one not even a lord. But I told him, you should see the work he gets out of Cromwell.’
‘He should have such a servant,’ he says. ‘But Eustache, you are an old hypocrite, you know. You would dance on my grave.’
‘My dear Thomas, you are always the only opponent.’
Thomas Avery smuggles in to him Luca Pacioli's book of chess puzzles. He has soon done all the puzzles, and drawn out some of his own on blank pages at the back. His letters are brought and he reviews the latest round of disasters. They say that the tailor at Münster, the King of Jerusalem with sixteen wives, has had a row with one of them and cut her head off in the marketplace.
He re-emerges into the world. Knock him down and he will get up. Death has called to inspect him, she has measured him, breathed into his face: walked away again. He is a little leaner, his clothes tell him; for a while he feels light, no longer grounded in the world, each day buoyant with possibilities. The Boleyns congratulate him heartily on his return to health, and so they should, for without him how would they be what they are
now? Cranmer, when they meet, keeps leaning forward to pat his shoulder and squeeze his hand.
While he has been recovering, the king has cropped his hair. He has done this to disguise his increasing baldness, though it doesn't, not at all. His loyal councillors have done the same, and soon it becomes a mark of fellowship between them. ‘By God, sir,’ Master Wriothesley says, ‘if I wasn't frightened of you before, I would be now.’
‘But Call-Me,’ he says, ‘you were frightened of me before.’
There is no change in Richard's aspect; committed to the tilting ground, he keeps his hair cropped to fit under a helmet. The shorn Master Wriothesley looks more intelligent, if that were possible, and Rafe more determined and alert. Richard Riche has lost the vestiges of the boy he was. Suffolk's huge face has acquired a strange innocence. Monseigneur looks deceptively ascetic. As for Norfolk, no one notices the change. ‘What sort of hair did he have before?’ Rafe asks. Strips of iron-grey fortify his scalp, as if laid out by a military engineer.
The fashion spreads into the country. When Rowland Lee next pitches into the Rolls House, he thinks a cannonball is coming at him. His son's eyes look large and calm, a still golden colour. Your mother would have wept over your baby curls, he says, rubbing his head affectionately. Gregory says, ‘Would she? I hardly remember her.’
As April goes out, four treacherous monks are put on trial. The oath has been offered them repeatedly, and refused. It is a year since the Maid was put to death. The king showed mercy to her followers; he is not now so disposed. It is the Charterhouse of London where the mischief originates, that austere house of men who sleep on straw; it is where Thomas More tried his vocation, before it was revealed to him that the world needed his talents. He, Cromwell, has visited the house, as he has visited the recalcitrant community at Syon. He has spoken gently, he has spoken bluntly, he has threatened and cajoled; he has sent enlightened clerics to argue the king's case, and he has interviewed the disaffected members of the community and set them to work against their brethren. It is all to no avail. Their response is, go away, go away and leave me to my sanctified death.
If they think that they will maintain to the end the equanimity of their prayer-lives, they are wrong, because the law demands the full traitor's penalty, the short spin in the wind and the conscious public disembowelling, a brazier alight for human entrails. It is the most horrible of all deaths, pain and rage and humiliation swallowed to the dregs, the fear so great that the strongest rebel is unmanned before the executioner with his knife can do the job; before each one dies he watches his fellows and, cut down from the rope, he crawls like an animal round and round on the bloody boards.
Wiltshire and George Boleyn are to represent the king at the spectacle, and Norfolk, who, grumbling, has been dragged up from the country and told to prepare for an embassy to France. Henry thinks of going himself to see the monks die, for the court will wear masks, edging on their high-stepping horses among the city officials and the ragged populace, who turn out by the hundred to see any such show. But the king's build makes it difficult to disguise him, and he fears there may be demonstrations in favour of Katherine, still a favourite with the more verminous portion of every crowd. Young Richmond shall stand in for me, his father decides; one day he may have to defend, in battle, his half-sister's title, so it becomes him to learn the sights and sounds of slaughter.
The boy comes to him at night, as the deaths are scheduled next day: ‘Good Master Secretary, take my place.’
‘Will you take mine, at my morning meeting with the king? Think of it like this,’ he says, firm and pleasant. ‘If you plead sickness, or fall off your horse tomorrow or vomit in front of your father-in-law, he'll never let you forget it. If you want him to let you into your bride's bed, prove yourself a man. Keep your eyes on the duke, and pattern your conduct on his.’
But Norfolk himself comes to him, when it is over, and says, Cromwell, I swear upon my life that one of the monks spoke when his heart was out. Jesus, he called, Jesus save us, poor Englishmen.
‘No, my lord. It is not possible he should do so.’
‘Do you know that for a fact?’
‘I know it from experience.’
The duke quails. Let him think it, that his past deeds have included the pulling out of hearts. ‘I dare say you're right.’ Norfolk crosses himself. ‘It must have been a voice from the crowd.’
The night before the monks met their end, he had signed a pass for Margaret Roper, the first in months. Surely, he thinks, for Meg to be with her father when traitors are being led out to their deaths; surely she will turn from her resolve, she will say to her father, come now, the king is in his killing vein, you must take the oath as I have done. Make a mental reservation, cross your fingers behind your back; only ask for Cromwell or any officer of the king, say the words, come home.
But his tactic fails. She and her father stood dry-eyed at a window as the traitors were brought out, still in their habits, and launched on their journey to Tyburn. I always forget, he thinks, how More neither pities himself nor takes pity on others. Because I would have protected my own girls from such a sight, I think he would too. But he uses Meg to harden his resolve. If she will not give way, he cannot; and she will not give way.
The following day he goes in to see More himself. The rain splashes and hisses from the stones underfoot; walls and water are indistinguishable, and around small corners a wind moans like a winter wind. When he has struggled out of his wet outer layers he stands chatting to the turnkey Martin, getting the news of his wife and new baby. How shall I find him, he asks at last and Martin says, have you ever noticed how he has one shoulder up and the other down?
It comes from overmuch writing, he says. One elbow on the desk, the other shoulder dropped. Well, whatever, Martin says: he looks like a little carved hunchback on a bench end.
More has grown his beard; he looks as one imagines the prophets of Münster to look, though he would abhor the comparison. ‘Master Secretary, how does the king take the news from abroad? They say the Emperor's troops are on the move.’
‘Yes, but to Tunis, I think.’ He casts a glance at the rain. ‘If you were the Emperor, wouldn't you pick Tunis, rather than London? Look, I haven't come to quarrel with you. Just to see if you are comfortable.’
More says, ‘I hear you have sworn my fool, Henry Pattinson.’ He laughs.
‘Whereas the men who died yesterday had followed your example, and refused to swear.’
‘Let me be clear. I am no example. I am just myself, alone. I say nothing against the act. I say nothing against the men that made it. I say nothing against the oath, or against any man that swears it.’
‘Ah, yes,’ he sits down on the chest where More keeps his possessions, ‘but all this saying nothing, it won't do for a jury, you know. Should it come to a jury.’
‘You have come to threaten me.’
‘The Emperor's feats of arms shorten the king's temper. He means to send you a commission, who will want a straight answer as to his title.’
‘Oh I'm sure your friends will be too good for me. Lord Audley? And Richard Riche? Listen. Ever since I came here I have been preparing for my death, at your hands – yes, yours – or at the hands of nature. All I require is peace and silence for my prayers.’
‘You want to be a martyr.’
‘No, what I want is to go home. I am weak, Thomas. I am weak as we all are. I want the king to take me as his servant, his loving subject, as I have never ceased to be.’
‘I have never understood where the line is drawn, between sacrifice and self-slaughter.’
‘Christ drew it.’
‘You don't see anything wrong with the comparison?’
Silence. The loud, contentious, quality of More's silence. It's bouncing off the walls. More says he loves England, and he fears all England will be damned. He is offering some kind of bargain to his God, his God who loves slaughter: ‘It is expedient that one man shall die for the people.’ Well, I tell y
ou, he says to himself. Bargain all you like. Consign yourself to the hangman if you must. The people don't give a fourpenny fuck. Today is 5 May. In two days' time the commission will visit you. We will ask you to sit, you will decline. You will stand before us looking like a desert father, and we snugly wrapped against the summer chill. I will say what I say. You will say what you say. And maybe I will concede you have won. I will walk away and leave you, the king's good subject if you say so, till your beard grows down to your knees and the spiders weave webs across your eyes.
Well, that's his plan. Events overtake it. He says to Richard, has any damnable bishop of Rome in the history of his pox-ridden jurisdiction ever done anything so stupidly ill-timed as this? Farnese has announced England is to have a new cardinal: Bishop Fisher. Henry is enraged. He swears he will send Fisher's head across the sea to meet his hat.
The third of June: himself to the Tower, with Wiltshire for the Boleyn interest, and Charles Brandon, looking as if he would as soon be fishing. Riche to make notes; Audley to make jokes. It's wet again, and Brandon says, this must be the worst summer ever, eh? Yes, he says, good thing His Majesty isn't superstitious. They laugh: Suffolk, a little uncertainly.
Some said the world would end in 1533. Last year had its adherents too. Why not this year? There is always somebody ready to claim that these are the end times, and nominate his neighbour as the Antichrist. The news from Münster is that the skies are falling fast. The besiegers are demanding unconditional surrender; the besieged are threatening mass suicide.
He leads the way. ‘Christ, what a place,’ Brandon says. Drips are spoiling his hat. ‘Doesn't it oppress you?’
‘Oh, we're always here.’ Riche shrugs. ‘One thing or another. Master Secretary is wanted at the Mint or the jewel house.’
