‘That is also a difficulty,’ the ambassador admits.
Old Bishop Fisher refused the oath, and last year Henry executed him. Thomas More refused it, and he too is shorter by a head. He says, ‘Mary is living in a fool’s paradise. Does she think we are headed back to Rome, because Anne Boleyn is dead?’
Chapuys sighs. ‘It grieves me, Thomas, that in the old days we were in Rome at the same time and did not know each another. How congenial, if we had been able to take supper together! Did you ever try those little ravioli, stuffed with cheese and herbs? They were light as air, if the cook knew his job.’ The ambassador adjusts his napkin over his shoulder. ‘The Emperor wishes the king success, of course, in his new marriage. He is sorry that your master did not pause to consider a bride of the Emperor’s choosing. With not much trouble, he could have had the Duchess of Milan, a tender little widow of sixteen. But it is done now, and we must make the best of it – the Emperor believes that if Madame Jane has a son, it will conduce to peace and stability. And from your point of view, mon cher, make Henry more …’ his eyes move sideways, ‘tractable. So despite what the lady’s brother said of his impotence, we must wish the king – how does Boccaccio put it? – “a resurrection of the flesh”.’
A boy brings the veal; he himself, Cromwell, takes up the carving knife.
‘I believe …’ Chapuys pauses, to let the servant go, ‘… I believe there is a general bewilderment in Germany. Your heretic friends know that Madame Jane was lady-in-waiting to Queen Katherine. They ask, has Cremuel lost his senses? Why would he destroy the concubine, who was a heretic like himself, and replace her with a good daughter of Rome?’ He dabs his mouth. ‘Unless Cremuel has a plot. But then, I say to the Emperor, Cremuel always has a plot. And as the evidence of the last fortnight shows us, his plots succeed.’
‘I was not responsible for Anne’s death,’ he says. ‘She herself brought it about, she and her gentlemen.’
‘But at a time of your choosing.’
He puts down the knife. The handle gleams, mother of pearl. ‘I could hardly dictate the timing of their quarrels.’
‘You told me that you did not know how to put an end to her, but you must do it, or she would kill you. You said you would go to your house and imagine it, how it might be. It seems your imagination is the most powerful in England. I dare say Henry was appalled at what emerged, once the investigation began.’ Chapuys wipes his fingers. ‘What a picture you have put in the mind of all Christian men! The Queen of England on her back with her skirts hauled up, “Come one, come all!”’
‘You must toss and turn at night, dwelling on it.’
‘Henry Norris, the king’s great friend. Francis Weston, some vain youth who was wandering past when she chanced to be naked. That north country ruffian Will Brereton. The boy Smeaton … she was not too proud to go to it with the poor child hired to play the lute. But why would she be? She was pleased to rut with her own brother.’ Chapuys puts down his napkin. ‘I understand how it was – Henry is tired of her, he wants the little Jane, he says, “Cremuel, find me a reason to be rid of her.” But he cannot have been prepared for what you would uncover. Perhaps he will not forgive you, mon cher, for exposing him to ridicule.’
‘On the contrary. He is promoting me.’
‘Yet the business must rankle. He may think about it later. But come now – I should congratulate you. You are to become a milord. Baron Cromwell of –’
‘Wimbledon.’
‘No,’ Chapuys says. ‘Choose some other place. One I can pronounce.’
‘And I am to be Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal.’
‘Ah. Privy Seal is greater?’
‘Privy Seal is all I could desire.’
The ambassador takes a sliver of veal. ‘You know, this is very good.’
‘I warn you,’ he says. ‘If Mary enrages her father, it will come home to your door.’
‘If your cook ever wants a new post, send him to my door also.’ Chapuys picks up the carving fork, and admires its tines. ‘We know that the princess will not take an oath which declares her father head of the church. She could not swear to what she regards as an impossibility. Perhaps, rather than persecute her, Henry would let her enter a nunnery? She could not then be suspected of wanting the throne. It would be an honourable retreat from the world. She could go into one of the great houses, where in time she might become abbess.’
‘Yes. Shaftesbury perhaps? Wilton?’ He puts his glass down. ‘Oh, spare me, ambassador! She will no more enter a convent than you will. If she cares so little for the world and all in it, why does she not take the oath and have done? No one will trouble her then.’
‘Mary may agree to give up her claims on the future, but not on the past. She will not believe that her mother and father were not married. She does not agree to have her mother called a whore.’
‘She was not called a whore. She was called Princess Dowager. And you know that after they separated Henry maintained her honourably and at some expense.’
‘Look, Katherine is dead.’ The ambassador speaks with passion. ‘Let her rest, yes?’
She doesn’t, though. Katherine pulls and drags at her daughter. She walks by night, at her side her lean and ancient counsellor Bishop Fisher, and in her hands a parchment pleading her cause. When the news of Katherine’s death came, there was dancing at court. But on the day of her funeral, Anne Boleyn miscarried a child. The corpse had risen from her bier, and bounced her supplanter till her teeth rattled: shaken her, till the king’s son came loose.
‘Ambassador,’ he puts his fingertips together, ‘let me assure you, Henry loves his daughter. But he expects obedience, as a father and a king.’
‘Mary gives first place to her Heavenly Father.’
‘But what if she were to die, with the sin of disobedience staining her soul?’
‘You are a ruffian, Cremuel,’ Chapuys says. ‘You cannot help yourself. Threaten, when you ought to conciliate. Henry will not kill his daughter.’
‘Who knows what Henry will do? Not I.’
‘This is what I tell the Emperor. Henry’s subjects live in fear. I exhort my master: it is your Christian duty to free England. Even the usurper Richard, the Scorpion, was not abhorred as is this present king.’
‘I discourage that phrase, “the present king”. It comes near treason. Anyone who uses it must have another king in view.’
‘Treason is only a crime in those who owe loyalty. I owe Henry nothing, except perhaps a formal thanks for his hospitality – which is no better than perfunctory, and far inferior’ – the ambassador bows – ‘to your own. All Europe knows how frail is his grip on the future. Only last January –’
Put the fork down, he thinks; stop stabbing me. The memory is sharp: a day of dazing cold and confusion, and he dragged from his desk to witness a catastrophe. The king’s horse had come down in the tilt yard. Henry took a blow to the head and was carried to a tent. He looked dead; we thought he was dead, as he lay like a bloodless effigy, no breath, no pulse. He remembers laying his hand on Henry’s chest, and feeling for the frailest thread of life – but what the bystanders told him, after, was that he called on God and then struck the king with enough force to break his ribs. What had he to lose? Shuddering, wheezing, retching, the king sat up – back in the land of the living. ‘Cromwell?’ he said. ‘I thought I should see angels.’
‘Very well,’ Chapuys says. ‘We will not mention his accident if it puts you off your supper. But it must be acknowledged that there are men in England, the best blood of your nation, who remain loyal sons of Rome.’
‘Do they?’ he says. ‘How can that be? Because they have all taken their oath to Henry. The Courtenays have taken it. The Poles. They have recognised him not only as their king to whom they owe their duty, but as head of the church.’
‘Of course,’ Chapuys says. ‘What else could they do? What cho
ice did you give them?’
‘You think oaths mean nothing to them, perhaps. You expect them to break their word.’
‘Not at all,’ the ambassador says soothingly. ‘I feel sure they would not move against their anointed king. My anxiety is that, inflamed by the justice of their ancient cause, some renegade supporter of theirs might give the king his death blow. A dagger thrust, it is easily done. It may be, even, it needs no human hand to strike. There is plague that kills in a day. There is the sweating sickness that kills in an hour. You know it is true, and if I were to shout it out to the populace at Paul’s Cross, you could not hang me for it.’
‘No.’ He smiles. ‘But ambassadors have been murdered in the street before now. I only mention it.’
The ambassador bows his head. He picks at his salad. A leaf of sweet lettuce, a spear of bitter endive. The boy Mathew comes in with fruit.
‘I am afraid once again we have failed with our apricots,’ he says. ‘It seems years since I ate them. Perhaps Bishop Gardiner will bring me some, if he comes over.’
Chapuys laughs. ‘I think they would be dipped in acid. You know he is assuring the French courtiers that Henry has plans to take your country back to Rome?’
He did not know, but he suspected. ‘In default of the apricots I have preserved peaches.’
Chapuys approves. ‘You do them in the Venetian fashion.’ He takes a spoonful and looks up, slyly. ‘What will happen to Guiett?’
‘What? Oh, Wyatt. He is in the Tower.’
‘I know well where he is. He is where you can watch him, while he writes his baffling verses and riddles. Why do you protect him? He should be dead.’
‘His father was a friend of my old master, the cardinal.’
‘And he asked you to cover for his son’s delinquencies?’ Chapuys laughs.
‘I gave my word,’ he says stiffly.
‘I perceive such a promise is sacred to you. Why? When nothing else is sacred? I do not understand you, Cremuel. You are not afraid, when you should be afraid. You are like someone who has loaded the dice.’
‘Loaded the dice?’ he says. ‘Is that what people do?’
‘You are playing with the greatest men in the land.’
‘What, Carve-Away and those folk?’
‘They know you need them. You cannot stand alone. Because if the new marriage does not last, what have you? You have Henry’s favour. But if he withdraws it? You know the cardinal’s fate. All his dignities as churchman could not save him. If he had not died on the road to London, Henry would have struck off his head, cardinal’s hat and all. And you have no one to protect you. You have certain friends, no doubt. The Seymours are grateful to you. The councillor Fitzwilliam has been a go-between, helping rid the concubine. But you have no affinity of your own, no great family at your back. For when all is said, you are a blacksmith’s son. Your whole life depends on the next beat of Henry’s heart, and your future on his smile or frown.’
In January when I thought the king was dead, he thinks, when they burst in shouting, I leapt up and said, ‘I’m coming, I’m right behind you’ – but before I quit the room I sanded the paper and dried the ink, and I picked up from the desk the Turkish dagger with the sunflower handle, which lay there as an ornament: so I had one knife in the coat, and one knife extra; then I went and found Henry, and I raised him from the dead.
‘I remember those little ravioli,’ he says. ‘At the Frescobaldi house, once Lent was over, we used to stuff them with minced pork. At the family table they liked them sprinkled with sugar.’
‘How typical of bankers,’ Chapuys says, sniffing. ‘More money than taste.’
Wriothesley sails into Austin Friars as they come from evening prayers. Richard says, ‘Call-Me is here, but you’ve had enough today – shall I sneck him off?’
‘No. I want him to go and see Mary.’
‘You trust him with that?’
‘I will send Rafe too, if the king will spare him. But Mary is tender of her status and she may think Rafe is too much associated with …’
‘With us,’ Richard says.
Mr Wriothesley, on the other hand, descends from a family of heralds. Heralds have a status all of their own, and they are keen on according to others what is due to them and no more. Call-Me comes in with parchments in hand: ‘When shall we begin addressing you as Lord Cromwell, sir?’
‘Soon as you like.’
‘I wonder … now that you are elevated, would you like a fresh look at your provenance?’ He unrolls coloured devices. ‘Here we see the arms of Ralph Cromwell, of Tattershall Castle, who was Lord Treasurer to the great Harry who conquered France.’
We have been here before. ‘I am nothing to Lord Ralph’s folk, nor they to me. You know my father and where I come from. If you don’t, you can ask Stephen Gardiner. He sent a man down to Putney to dig out my secrets.’
Call-Me longs to ask, and did he? But he holds to his point. ‘You should revisit the matter. The king would feel more at ease with you.’
Richard says, ‘He could hardly be more at ease than he is.’
‘But you would be the more esteemed if you had an ancient name. Not just by your peers, but by all the common people, and in foreign courts too. They slight you, abroad – they are saying that Henry has dismissed you and appointed two bishops to govern.’
‘I would lay a wager one of them is Bishop Stephen.’ He admires these speculative worlds, that grow up in the crevices between truths. ‘What else are they saying?’
‘That the lovers of the concubine have been quartered, she forced to watch before she was burned. They take us for barbarians like themselves. They say her whole family is locked up. I can see the lady’s father will have trouble convincing people he is not dead too. I suppose you spared him because …’ Call-Me hesitates. ‘I suppose he fell in with your wishes, and you need to show people that you can reward them for doing that.’
If you call it a reward, the life Thomas Boleyn will lead now. He says, ‘I believe in economy of means. The headsman has to be paid, you know, Wriothesley. Do you think he practises his trade gratis?’
Call-Me checks, and blinks, and takes a breath: earnest, he sticks to his task. ‘They are saying that the Lady Mary is back at court already, and wearing the jewels of the late queen. They say that the king has in mind to marry her to the French king’s son, the Duke of Angoulême, and that the prince will come and live in England, to be trained up as king.’
‘I hear she is disinclined to matrimony.’
‘You have broached it then?’
‘One must keep French hopes alive.’
Call-Me is not sure whether he is being teased. He – Lord Cromwell – examines the other Lord Cromwell’s coat of arms. ‘I prefer the Cornish choughs I got from the cardinal. Anything today from Calais?’
In Calais, the spites and feuds of the leading families are enclosed by the town walls: those crumbling walls, England’s defence, are a sink of expenditure, and riddled by rumour, undermined by intrigue. Calais is a sort of purgatory; pained, one waits and waits, not for forgiveness but for a favourable wind. What is said in the citadel is carried across the sea, hissing, rustling, amplified by the waves; it breaks against the king’s attention in Whitehall. Calais is our last foothold on the mainland. Its pale is our last territory. It should be ruled by the strongest and steadiest man the king has. Instead it is ruled by Lord Lisle. Lisle is the king’s uncle – one of old King Edward’s bastards – and Henry is fond of him, having found him a genial playmate when he was a child. Already he is pestering for some advantage from recent events. Mindful of the need to be constantly in the king’s thoughts, he had Harry Norris in his pocket, pushing his name forward for sinecures and promotions. That’s all gone now, Norris being worm-food.
Call-Me says, ‘It’s Lisle’s wife who causes the trouble. She is a shrew and I hear she is a papist.
You know she has daughters from her first marriage? She was always trying to get one of them placed with Anne. She will want to try again with our new queen.’
‘I think Jane is supplied,’ he says. ‘Call-Me, I want you and Rafe to go up to Hunsdon and try and talk Mary into sense. But be gentle with her. She’s not well.’
Mary’s letter is in his pocket. Even in his own house he dare not leave it down. Mary says she has a rheum in her head. She cannot sleep. Her teeth ache. It would comfort her to see her father. False friends keep them apart. When the false friends are cast aside or smitten by the sword of justice, when the false counsellors are elbowed into the Thames, her father the king will turn to her, she says – the scales falling from his eyes – and see her for what she is, his true heir and daughter.
But first the king must send for her. Bring her to the light of his presence. Till then she is the maiden embowered. She sits in the closed garden, ready to be discovered. She lies under an enchantment, in a thicket of thorns, and waits for someone who has the commitment to hack through.
‘Go yourself, sir,’ Wriothesley says.
He shakes his head.
‘Perhaps you do not want to be the one to bring her bad news.’
‘She loves her father,’ he says. ‘She cannot believe – well – but she must be brought to believe. He will not tolerate defiance. Not from a child to whom he gave life.’
The sun is declining: a last ray of warmth flits across the books on his table: the Decretals of Pope Gregory, a copy heavily annotated, and marked with the monogram ‘TC’ – Thomas Cardinalis. In the shifting twilight, shadowed like water, he can see a figure of the king’s daughter: huddled into herself, her face pale and set. It entrances him, the stealthy movement of the light where she forms herself, a living ghost. She does not look at him; he looks at her. ‘You must tell her, Wriothesley, “Obedience, madam, is the virtue that will save you. Obedience is not servility, either of your person or your conscience. Rather, it is loyalty.”’
The Mirror and the Light: 2020’s highly anticipated conclusion to the best selling, award winning Wolf Hall series (The Wolf Hall Trilogy, Book 3) Page 7
