She says, I don’t think it suits any complexion, myself. And Anne should stick to black.
On this happy occasion, Henry wants to show off the princess. You would think such a small child – she is now almost two and a half – would be looking about her for her nurse, but Elizabeth chuckles as she is passed hand-to-hand by the gentlemen, scuffing up their beards and batting at their hats. Her father bounces her in his arms. ‘She looks forward to seeing her little brother, don’t you, dumpling?’
There is a stir from the courtiers; all Europe knows Anne’s condition, but it is the first time it has been mentioned in public. ‘And I share her impatience,’ the king says. ‘It’s been long enough to wait.’
Elizabeth’s face is losing its baby roundness. Hail Princess Ferret Face. The older courtiers say they can see the king’s father in her, and his brother, Prince Arthur. She has her mother’s eyes though, busy and full in their orbits. He thinks Anne’s eyes beautiful, though best when they gleam with interest, as a cat’s do when she sees the whisk of some small creature’s tail.
The king seizes back his darling and coos to her. ‘Up to the sky!’ he says, and tosses her up, then swoops her down and plants a kiss on her head.
Lady Rochford says, ‘Henry has a tender heart, does he not? Of course, he is pleased with any child. I have seen him kiss a stranger’s baby in much the same way.’
At the first sign of fractiousness the child is taken away, wrapped tight in furs. Anne’s eyes follow her. Henry says, as if remembering his manners, ‘We must accept that the country will mourn for the dowager.’
Anne says, ‘They didn’t know her. How can they mourn? What was she to them? A foreigner.’
‘I suppose it is proper,’ the king says, reluctant. ‘As she was once given the title of queen.’
‘Mistakenly,’ Anne says. She is relentless.
The musicians strike up. The king tows Mary Shelton into the dance. Mary is laughing. She has been missing this last half hour, and now she’s pink-cheeked, her eyes brilliant; no mistaking what she’s been doing. He thinks, if old Bishop Fisher could see this kick-up, he would think the Antichrist has arrived. He is surprised to find himself, even for a moment, viewing the world through Bishop Fisher’s eyes.
On London Bridge after his execution, Fisher’s head remained in such a state of preservation that the Londoners began to talk of a miracle. Eventually he had the bridge keeper pull it down and drop it in a weighted sack into the Thames.
At Kimbolton, Katherine’s body has been turned over to the embalmers. He imagines a rustle in the dark, a sigh, as the nation arranges itself to pray. ‘She sent me a letter,’ Henry says. He slides it from among the folds of his yellow jacket. ‘I don’t want it. Here, Cromwell, take it away.’
As he folds it he glances at it: ‘And lastly I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things.’
After the dancing, Anne calls him in. She is sombre, dry, attentive: all business. ‘I wish to make my thoughts known to Lady Mary the king’s daughter.’ He notes the respectful address. It isn’t ‘the Princess Mary’. But it isn’t ‘the Spanish bastard’ either. ‘Now that her mother is gone and cannot influence her,’ Anne says, ‘we may hope she will be less stiff in maintaining her errors. I have no need to conciliate her, God knows. But I think if I could put an end to the ill-feeling between the king and Mary, he would thank me for it.’
‘He would be beholden to you, madam. And it would be an act of charity.’
‘I wish to be a mother to her.’ Anne flushes; it does sound unlikely. ‘I do not expect her to call me “my lady mother”, but I expect her to call me Your Highness. If she will conform herself to her father I shall be pleased to have her at court. She will have an honoured place, and not much below mine. I shall not expect a deep reverence from her, but the ordinary form of courtesy which royal persons use among themselves, within their families, the younger to the elder. Assure her, I shall not make her carry my train. She will not have to sit at table with her sister the Princess Elizabeth, so no question of her lower rank will arise. I think this is a fair offer.’ He waits. ‘If she will render me the respect which is my due, I shall not walk before her on ordinary occasions, but we will walk hand in hand.’
For one so tender about her dignities as Anne the queen, it is an unparalleled set of concessions. But he imagines Mary’s face when it is put to her. He is glad he will not be there to see it in person.
He makes a respectful good night, but Anne calls him back. She says, in a low voice: ‘Cremuel, this is my offer, I will go no further. I am resolved to make it and then I cannot be blamed. But I do not think she will take it, and then we will both be sorry, for we are condemned to fight till the breath goes out of our bodies. She is my death, and I am hers. So tell her, I shall make sure she does not live to laugh at me after I am gone.’
He goes to Chapuys’s house to pay his condolences. The ambassador is wrapped in black. A draught is cutting through his rooms that seems to blow straight from the river, and his mood is one of self-reproach. ‘How I wish I had not left her! But she seemed better. She sat up that morning and they dressed her hair. I had seen her eat some bread, a mouthful or two, I thought that was an advance. I rode away in hope, and within hours she was failing.’
‘You must not blame yourself. Your master will know you did all you could. After all, you are sent here to watch the king, you cannot be too long from London in the winter.’
He thinks, I have been there since Katherine’s trials began: a hundred scholars, a thousand lawyers, ten thousand hours of argument. Almost since the first word was spoken against her marriage, for the cardinal kept me informed; late at night with a glass of wine, he would talk about the king’s great matter and how he saw it would work out.
Badly, he said.
‘Oh, this fire,’ Chapuys says. ‘Do you call this a fire? Do you call this a climate?’ Smoke from the wood eddies past them. ‘Smoke and smells and no heat!’
‘Get a stove. I’ve got stoves.’
‘Oh, yes,’ the ambassador moans, ‘but then the servants stuff them with rubbish and they blow up. Or the chimneys fall apart and you have to send across the sea for a man to fix them. I know all about stoves.’ He rubs his blue hands. ‘I told her chaplain, you know. When she is on her deathbed, I said, ask her whether Prince Arthur left her a virgin or not. All the world must believe a declaration made by a dying woman. But he is an old man. In his grief and trouble he forgot. So now we will never be sure.’
That is a large admission, he thinks: that the truth may be other than what Katherine told us all these years. ‘But do you know,’ Chapuys says, ‘before I left her, she said a troubling thing to me. She said, “It might be all my fault. That I stood out against the king, when I could have made an honourable withdrawal and let him marry again.” I said to her, madam – because I was amazed – madam, what are you thinking, you have right on your side, the great weight of opinion, both lay and clerical – “Ah but,” she said to me, “to the lawyers there was doubt in the case. And if I erred, then I drove the king, who does not brook opposition, to act according to his worse nature, and therefore I partly share in the guilt of his sin.” I said to her, good madam, only the harshest authority would say so; let the king bear his own sins, let him answer for them. But she shook her head.’ Chapuys shakes his, distressed, perplexed. ‘All those deaths, the good Bishop Fisher, Thomas More, the sainted monks of the Charterhouse…“I am going out of life,” she said, “dragging their corpses.”’
He is silent. Chapuys crosses the room to his desk and opens a little inlaid box. ‘Do you know what this is?’
He picks up the silk flower, carefully in case it falls to dust in his fingers. ‘Yes. Her present from Henry. Her present when the New Year’s prince was born.’
‘It shows the king in a good light. I would not have believed him so tender. I am sure I would not have thought to do it.’
‘You are a sad old bachelor, Eustache.’
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‘And you a sad old widower. What did you give your wife, when your lovely Gregory was born?’
‘Oh, I suppose…a gold dish. A gold chalice. Something to set up on her shelf.’ He hands back the silk flower. ‘A city wife wants a present she can weigh.’
‘Katherine gave me this rose as we parted,’ Chapuys says. ‘She said, it is all I have to bequeath. She told me, choose a flower from the coffer and go. I kissed her hand and took to the road.’ He sighs. He drops the flower on his desk and slides his hands into his sleeves. ‘They tell me the concubine is consulting diviners to tell the sex of her child, although she did that before and they all told her it was a boy. Well, the queen’s death has altered the position of the concubine. But not perhaps in the way she would like.’
He lets that pass. He waits. Chapuys says, ‘I am informed that Henry paraded his little bastard about the court when he heard the news.’
Elizabeth is a forward child, he tells the ambassador. But then you must remember that, when he was hardly a year older than his daughter is now, the young Henry rode through London, perched on the saddle of a warhorse, six feet from the ground and gripping the pommel with fat infant fists. You should not discount her, he tells Chapuys, just because she is young. The Tudors are warriors from their cradle.
‘Ah, well, yes,’ Chapuys flicks a speck of ash from his sleeve. ‘Assuming she is a Tudor. Which some people do doubt. And the hair proves nothing, Cremuel. Considering I could go out on the street and catch half a dozen redheads without a net.’
‘So,’ he says, laughing, ‘you consider Anne’s child could have been fathered by any passer-by?’
The ambassador hesitates. He does not like to admit he has been listening to French rumours. ‘Anyway,’ he sniffs, ‘even if she is Henry’s child, she is still a bastard.’
‘I must leave you.’ He stands up. ‘Oh. I should have brought back your Christmas hat.’
‘You may have custody of it.’ Chapuys huddles into himself. ‘I shall be in mourning for some time. But do not wear it, Thomas. You will stretch it out of shape.’
Call-Me-Risley comes straight from the king, with news of the funeral arrangements.
‘I said to him, Majesty, you will bring the body to St Paul’s? He said, she can be laid to rest in Peterborough, Peterborough is an ancient and honourable place and it will cost less. I was astonished. I persisted, I said to him, these things are done by precedent. Your Majesty’s sister Mary, the Duke of Suffolk’s wife, was taken to Paul’s to lie in state. And do you not call Katherine your sister? And he said, ah but, my sister Mary was a royal lady, once married to the King of France.’ Wriothesley frowns. ‘And Katherine is not royal, he claims, though both her parents were sovereigns. The king said, she will have all she is entitled to as Dowager Princess of Wales. He said, where is the cloth of estate that was put over the hearse when Arthur died? It must be somewhere in the Wardrobe. It can be reused.’
‘That makes sense,’ he says. ‘The Prince of Wales’s feathers. There wouldn’t be time to weave a new one. Unless we keep her lingering above ground for it.’
‘It appears that she asked for five hundred masses for her soul,’ Wriothesley says. ‘But I was not about to tell Henry that, because from day to day one never knows what he believes. Anyway, the trumpets blew. And he marched off to Mass. And the queen with him. And she was smiling. And he had a new gold chain.’
Wriothesley’s tone suggests he is curious: just that. It passes no judgement on Henry.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘if you’re dead, Peterborough is as good a place as any.’
Richard Riche is up in Kimbolton taking an inventory, and has started a spat with Henry about Katherine’s effects; not that Riche loved the old queen, but he loves the law. Henry wants her plate and her furs, but Riche says, Majesty, if you were never married to her, she was a feme sole not a feme covert, if you were not her husband you have no right to lay hands on her property.
He has been laughing over it. ‘Henry will get the furs,’ he says. ‘Riche will find the king a way around it, believe me. You know what she should have done? Bundled them up and given them to Chapuys. There’s a man who feels the chill.’
A message comes, for Anne the queen from the Lady Mary, in reply to her kind offer to be a mother to her. Mary says she has lost the best mother in the world and has no need for a substitute. As for fellowship with her father’s concubine, she would not degrade herself. She would not hold hands with someone who has shaken paws with the devil.
He says, ‘Perhaps the timing was awry. Perhaps she had heard of the dancing. And the yellow dress.’
Mary says she will obey her father, so far as her honour and her conscience allow. But that is all she will do. She will not make any statement or take any oath that requires her to recognise that her mother was not married to her father, or to accept a child of Anne Boleyn as heir of England.
Anne says, ‘How does she dare? Why does she even think she can negotiate? If my child is a boy, I know what will happen to her. She had better make her peace with her father now, not come crying to him for mercy when it is too late.’
‘It’s good advice,’ he says. ‘I doubt she will take it.’
‘Then I can do no more.’
‘I honestly think you cannot.’
And he does not see what more he can do for Anne Boleyn. She is crowned, she is proclaimed, her name is written in the statutes, in the rolls: but if the people do not accept her as queen…
Katherine’s funeral is planned for 29 January. The early bills are coming in, for the mourning attire and candles. The king continues elated. He is ordering up court entertainments. There is to be a tournament in the third week of the month and Gregory is down as a contestant. Already the boy is in a sweat of preparation. He keeps calling in his armourer, sending him off and calling him back again; changing his mind about his horse. ‘Father, I hope I am not drawn against the king,’ he says. ‘Not that I fear him. But it will be hard work, trying to remember it is him, and also trying to forget it is him, trying your best to get a touch but please God no more than a touch. Suppose I should have the bad luck to unhorse him? Can you imagine if he came down, and to a novice like me?’
‘I wouldn’t worry,’ he says. ‘Henry was jousting before you could walk.’
‘That’s the whole difficulty, sir. He is not as quick as he was. So the gentlemen say. Norris says, he’s lost his apprehension. Norris says you can’t do it if you’re not scared, and Henry is convinced he is the best, so he fears no opponent. And you should fear, Norris says. It keeps you sharp.’
‘Next time,’ he says, ‘get drawn on the king’s team at the start. That avoids the problem.’
‘How would one do that?’
Oh, dear God. How would one do anything, Gregory? ‘I’ll have a word,’ he says patiently.
‘No, don’t.’ Gregory is upset. ‘How would that stand with my honour? If you were there arranging matters? This is something I must do for myself. I know you know everything, father. But you were never in the lists.’
He nods. As you please. His son clanks away. His tender son.
As the New Year begins, Jane Seymour continues her duties about the queen, unreadable expressions drifting across her face as if she were moving within a cloud. Mary Shelton tells him: ‘The queen says that if Jane gives way to Henry he will be tired of her after a day, and if she does not give way he will be tired of her anyway. Then Jane will be sent back to Wolf Hall, and her family will lock her in a convent because she is no further use to them. And Jane says nothing.’ Shelton laughs, but kindly enough. ‘Jane does not feel it would be very different. As she is now in a portable convent, and bound by her own vows. She says, “Master Secretary thinks I would be very sinful to let the king hold my hand, though he begs me, ‘Jane, give me your little paw.’ And as Master Secretary is second only to the king in church affairs, and a very godly man, I take notice of what he says.”’
One day Henry seizes Jane as
she is passing and sits her on his knee. It is a sportive gesture, boyish, impetuous, no harm in it; so he says later, excusing himself sheepishly. Jane does not smile or speak. She sits calmly till she is released, as if the king were any joint-stool.
Christophe comes to him, whispering: ‘Sir, they are saying on the streets that Katherine was murdered. They are saying that the king locked her in a room and starved her to death. They are saying that he sent her almonds, and she ate, and was poisoned. They are saying that you sent two murderers with knives, and that they cut out her heart, and that when it was inspected, your name was branded there in big black letters.’
‘What? On her heart? “Thomas Cromwell”?’
Christophe hesitates. ‘Alors…Perhaps just your initials.’
Part Two
I
The Black Book
LONDON, JANUARY–APRIL 1536
When he hears the shout of ‘Fire!’ he turns over and swims back into his dream. He supposes the conflagration is a dream; it’s the sort he has.
Then he wakes to Christophe bellowing in his ear. ‘Get up! The queen is on fire.’
He is out of bed. The cold slices into him. Christophe yells, ‘Quick, quick! She is totally incinderated.’
Moments later, when he arrives on the queen’s floor, he finds the smell of singed cloth heavy in the air, and Anne surrounded by gibbering women, but unhurt, in a chair, wrapped in black silk, with a chalice of warmed wine in her hands. The cup jiggles, spills a little; Henry is tearful, hugging her, and his heir who is inside her. ‘If only I had been with you, sweetheart. If only I had spent the night. I could have put you out of danger in an instant.’
On and on he goes. Thank the Lord God who watches over us. Thank the God who protects England. If only I. With a blanket, a quilt, stifling them. I, in an instant, beating out the flames.