Cranmer laughs. At last, he laughs. It has been a hard-fought campaign, to get him even to smile. ‘As you wish, Thomas. We shall have a dinner.’
The archbishop sets his hands on his upper arms, kisses him right and left. The kiss of peace. He does not feel soothed, or assuaged, as he returns to his own rooms through the palace unnaturally quiet: no music from distant rooms, perhaps the murmur of prayer. He tries to imagine the lost child, the manikin, its limbs budding, its face old and wise.
Few men have seen such a thing. Certainly he has not. In Italy, once, he stood holding up a light for a surgeon, while in a sealed room draped in shadows he sliced a dead man apart to see what made him work. It was a fearful night, the stench of bowel and blood clogging the throat, and the artists who had jostled and bribed for a place tried to elbow him away: but he stood firm, for he had guaranteed to do so, he had said he would hold the light. And so he was among the elect of that company, the luminaries, who saw muscle stripped from bone. But he has never seen inside a woman, still less a gravid corpse; no surgeon, even for money, would perform that work for an audience.
He thinks of Katherine, embalmed and entombed. Her spirit cut free, and gone to seek out her first husband: wandering now, calling his name. Will Arthur be shocked to see her, she such a stout old woman, and he still a skinny child?
King Arthur of blessed memory could not have a son. And what happened after Arthur? We don’t know. But we know his glory vanished from the world.
He thinks of Anne’s chosen motto, painted up with her coat of arms: ‘The Most Happy’.
He had said to Jane Rochford, ‘How is my lady the queen?’
Rochford had said, ‘Sitting up, lamenting.’
He had meant, has she lost much blood?
Katherine was not without sin, but now her sins are taken off her. They are all heaped upon Anne: the shadow who flits after her, the woman draped in night. The old queen dwells in the radiance of God’s presence, her dead infants swaddled at her feet, but Anne dwells in this sinful world below, stewed in her childbed sweat, in her soiled sheet. But her hands and feet are cold and her heart is like a stone.
So here’s the Duke of Norfolk, expecting to be fed. Dressed in his best, or at least what’s good enough for Lambeth Palace, he looks like a piece of rope chewed by a dog, or a piece of gristle left on the side of a trencher. Bright fierce eyes under unruly brows. Hair an iron stubble. His person is meagre, sinewy, and he smells of horses and leather and the armourer’s shop, and mysteriously of furnaces or perhaps of cooling ash: dust-dry, pungent. He fears no one alive except Henry Tudor, who could at a whim take his dukedom away, but he fears the dead. They say that at any of his houses at close of day you can hear him slamming the shutters and shooting the bolts, in case the late Cardinal Wolsey is blowing through a window or slithering up a stair. If Wolsey wanted Norfolk he would lie quiet inside a table top, breathing along the grain of the wood; he would ooze through a keyhole, or flop down a chimney with a soft flurry like a soot-stained dove.
When Anne Boleyn came up in the world, and she a niece of his illustrious family, the duke thought his troubles were over. Because he has troubles; the greatest nobleman has his rivals, his ill-wishers, his defamers. But he believed that, with Anne crowned in due time, he would be always at the king’s right hand. It hasn’t worked out like that, and the duke has become disaffected. The match hasn’t brought the Howards the riches and honours he expected. Anne has taken the rewards for herself, and Thomas Cromwell has taken them. The duke thinks Anne should be guided by her male kin, but she won’t be guided; in fact she has made it plain that she sees herself, and not the duke, as the head of the family now. Which is unnatural, in the duke’s view: a woman cannot be head of anything, subordination and submission is her role. Let her be a queen and a rich woman, still she should know her place, or be taught it. Howard sometimes grumbles in public: not about Henry, but about Anne Boleyn. And he has found it expedient to spend his time in his own country, harassing his duchess, who often writes to Thomas Cromwell with complaints of his treatment of her. As if he, Thomas Cromwell, could turn the duke into one of the world’s great lovers, or even into a semblance of a reasonable man.
But then when Anne’s latest pregnancy was known, the duke had come to court, flanked by his smirking retainers and soon joined by his peculiar son. Surrey is a young man with a great conceit of himself as handsome, talented and lucky. But his face is lopsided, and he does himself no favours, in having his hair cut like a bowl. Hans Holbein admits he finds him a challenge. Surrey is here tonight at Lambeth, forfeiting an evening in the brothel. His eyes roam about the room; perhaps he thinks Cranmer keeps naked girls behind the arras.
‘Well, now,’ says the duke, rubbing his hands. ‘When are you coming down to see me at Kenninghall, Thomas Cromwell? We have good hunting, by God, we have something to shoot at every season of the year. And we can get you a bedwarmer if you want one, a common woman of the type you like, we have a maidservant just now,’ the duke sucks in his breath, ‘you should see her titties.’ His knotty fingers knead the air.
‘Well, if she’s yours,’ he murmurs. ‘I wouldn’t like to deprive you.’
The duke shoots a glance at Cranmer. Perhaps one ought not to talk about women? But then, Cranmer’s not a proper archbishop, not in Norfolk’s view; he’s some petty clerk Henry found in the fens one year, who promised to do anything he asked in return for a mitre and two good meals a day.
‘By God, you look ill, Cranmer,’ the duke says with gloomy relish. ‘You look as if you can’t keep the flesh on your bones. No more can I. Look at this.’ The duke thrusts himself back from the table, elbowing a poor youth who stands ready with the wine jug. He stands up and parts his gown, thrusting out a skinny calf. ‘What do you make of that?’
That’s horrible, he agrees. It’s humiliation, surely, that wears Thomas Howard to the bone? In company his niece interrupts him and talks over him. She laughs at his holy medals and the relics he wears, some of them very sacred. At table she leans towards him, says, Come, uncle, take a crumb from my hand, you are wasting away. ‘And I am,’ he says. ‘I don’t know how you do it, Cromwell. Look at you, all fleshed out in your gown, an ogre would eat you roasted.’
‘Ah, well,’ he says, smiling, ‘that’s the risk I run.’
‘I think you drink some powder that you got in Italy. Keeps you sleek. I suppose you wouldn’t part with the secret?’
‘Eat up your jelly, my lord,’ he says patiently. ‘If I do hear of a powder I will get a sample for you. My only secret is that I sleep at night. I am at peace with my maker. And of course,’ he adds, leaning back at his ease, ‘I have no enemies.’
‘What?’ says the duke. His eyebrows shoot up into his hair. He serves himself some more of Thurston’s jelly crenellations, the scarlet and the pale, the airy stone and the bloody brick. As he swills them around his mouth he opines on several topics. Chiefly Wiltshire, the queen’s father. Who should have brought Anne up properly and with more attention to discipline. But no, he was too busy boasting about her in French, boasting about what she would become.
‘Well, she did become,’ says young Surrey. ‘Didn’t she, my lord father?’
‘I think it’s she who’s wasting me away,’ the duke says. ‘She knows all about powders. They say she keeps poisoners in her house. You know what she did to old Bishop Fisher.’
‘What did she do?’ young Surrey says.
‘Do you know nothing, boy? Fisher’s cook was paid to put a powder in the broth. It nigh killed him.’
‘That would have been no loss,’ the boy says. ‘He was a traitor.’
‘Yes,’ Norfolk says, ‘but in those days his treason stood still to be proved. This is not Italy, boy. We have courts of law. Well, the old fellow pulled around, but he was never well after. Henry had the cook boiled alive.’
‘But he never confessed,’ he says: he, Cromwell. ‘So we cannot say for sure the Boleyns did it.’
N
orfolk snorts. ‘They had motive. Mary had better watch herself.’
‘I agree,’ he says. ‘Though I do not think poison is the chief danger to her.’
‘What then?’ Surrey says.
‘Bad advice, my lord.’
‘You think she should listen to you, Cromwell?’ Young Surrey now lays down his knife and begins to complain. Noblemen, he laments, are not respected as they were in the days when England was great. The present king keeps about himself a collection of men of base degree, and no good will come of it. Cranmer creeps forward in his chair, as if to intervene, but Surrey gives him a glare that says, you’re exactly who I mean, archbishop.
He nods to a boy to refill the young man’s glass. ‘You do not suit your talk to your audience, sir.’
‘Why should I?’ Surrey says.
‘Thomas Wyatt says you are studying to write verse. I am fond of poems, as I passed my youth among the Italians. If you would favour me, I would like to read some.’
‘No doubt you would,’ Surrey says. ‘But I keep them for my friends.’
When he gets home his son comes out to greet him. ‘Have you heard what the queen is doing? She has risen from her childbed and things incredible are spoken of her. They say she was seen toasting cobnuts over the fire in her chamber, tossing them about in a latten pan, ready to make poisoned sweetmeats for the Lady Mary.’
‘It would be someone else with the latten pan,’ he says, smiling. ‘A minion. Weston. That boy Mark.’
Gregory sticks stubbornly by his version: ‘It was herself. Toasting. And the king came in, and frowned to see her at the occupation, for he didn’t know what it meant, and he has suspicions of her, you see. What are you at, he asked, and Anne the queen said, oh my lord, I am but making sweetmeats to reward the poor women who stand at the gate and call out their greetings to me. The king said, is it even so, sweetheart? Then bless you. And so he was utterly misled, you see.’
‘And where did this happen, Gregory? You see, she is at Greenwich, and the king at Whitehall.’
‘No matter,’ Gregory says cheerfully. ‘In France witches can fly, latten pan and cobnuts and all. And that is where she learned it. In truth the whole Boleyn affinity are become witches, to witch up a boy for her, for the king fears he can give her none.’
His smile becomes pained. ‘Do not spread this about the household.’
Gregory says happily, ‘Too late, the household has spread it about me.’
He remembers Jane Rochford saying to him, it must be two years back: ‘The queen has boasted she will give Katherine’s daughter a breakfast she will not recover from.’
Merry at breakfast, dead by dinner. It was what they used to say about the sweating sickness, that killed his wife and daughters. And unnatural ends, when they occur, are usually swifter than that; they cut down at a stroke.
‘I am going to my rooms,’ he says. ‘I have to draw up a paper. Do not let me be interrupted. Richard may come in if he will.’
‘What about me, can I come in? For instance, if the house were on fire, you would like to hear of it?’
‘Not from you. Why would I believe you?’ He pats his son. Hurries off to his private room and shuts the door.
The meeting with Norfolk has, on the face of it, no pay-off. But. He takes his paper. At the top he writes:
THOMAS BOLEYN
This is the lady’s father. He pictures him in his mind. An upright man, still lithe, proud of his looks, who pays great attention to turning himself out, just like his son George: a man to test the ingenuity of London goldsmiths, and to swivel around his fingers jewels which he says have been given him by foreign rulers. These many years he has served Henry as a diplomat, a trade for which he is fitted by his cold emollience. He is not a man wedded to action, Boleyn, but rather a man who stands by, smirking and stroking his beard; he thinks he looks enigmatic, but instead he looks as if he’s pleasuring himself.
Still, he knew how to act when the chance presented itself, how to set his family climbing, climbing, to the highest branches of the tree. It’s cold up there when the wind blows, the cutting wind of 1536.
As we know, his title of Earl of Wiltshire seems to him insufficient to indicate his special status, so he has invented for himself a French title, Monseigneur. And it gives him pleasure, to be so addressed. He lets it be known this title should be universally adopted. From whether the courtiers comply, you can tell a great deal about where they stand.
He writes:
Monseigneur: All the Boleyns. Their women. Their chaplains. Their servants.
All the Boleyn toadies in the privy chamber, that is to say,
Henry Norris
Francis Weston
William Brereton, etc.
But plain old ‘Wiltshire’, delivered in accents brisk:
The Duke of Norfolk.
Sir Nicholas Carew (of the privy chamber) who is cousin to Edward Seymour, and married to the sister of:
Sir Francis Bryan, cousin to the Boleyns, but cousin to the Seymours also, and friend of:
Mr Treasurer, William Fitzwilliam.
He looks at this list. He adds the names of two grandees:
The Marquis of Exeter, Henry Courtenay.
Henry Pole, Lord Montague.
These are the old families of England; they draw their claims from ancient lines; they smart, more than any of us, under the pretensions of the Boleyns.
He rolls up his paper. Norfolk, Carew, Fitz. Francis Bryan. The Courtenays, the Montagues, and their ilk. And Suffolk, who hates Anne. It is a set of names. You cannot take too much from it. These people are not necessarily friends of each other. They are just, to one degree and another, friends of the old dispensation and enemies of the Boleyns.
He closes his eyes. He sits, his breathing calm. In his mind, a picture appears. A lofty hall. Into which he commands a table.
The trestles are lugged up by menials.
The top is fixed in place.
Liveried officials unroll the cloth, tweaking and smoothing; like the king’s tablecloth, it is blessed, its attendants murmuring a Latin formula as they stand back to take a view and even up the edges.
So much for the table. Now for somewhere for the guests to sit.
The servants scrape over the floor a weighty chair, the Howard coat of arms carved into its back. That’s for the Duke of Norfolk, who lowers his bony bum. ‘What have you got,’ he asks plaintively, ‘to tempt my appetite, Crumb?’
Now bring up another chair, he commands the servants. Set it down at my lord Norfolk’s right hand.
This one is for Henry Courtenay, the Marquis of Exeter. Who says, ‘Cromwell, my wife insisted on coming!’
‘It does my heart good to see you, Lady Gertrude,’ he says, bowing. ‘Take your seat.’ Until this dinner, he has always tried to avoid this rash and interfering woman. But now he puts on his polite face: ‘Any friend of the Lady Mary is welcome to dine.’
‘The Princess Mary,’ Gertrude Courtenay snaps.
‘As you will, my lady,’ he sighs.
‘Now here comes Henry Pole!’ Norfolk exclaims. ‘Will he steal my dinner?’
‘There is food for all,’ he says. ‘Bring up another chair for Lord Montague. A fitting chair, for a man of royal blood.’
‘We call it a throne,’ Montague says. ‘By the way, my mother is here.’
Lady Margaret Pole, the Countess of Salisbury. Rightful queen of England, according to some. King Henry has taken a wise course with her and all her family. He has honoured them, cherished them, kept them close. Much good it’s done him: they still think the Tudors are usurpers, though the countess is fond of Princess Mary, whose childhood governor she was: honouring her more for her royal mother, Katherine, than for her father, whom she regards as the spawn of Welsh cattle-raiders.
Now the countess, in his mind, creaks to her place. She stares around her. ‘You have a magnificent hall here, Cromwell,’ she says, peeved.
‘The rewards of vice,’ says her son Mont
ague.
He bows again. He will swallow any insult, at this point.
‘Well,’ Norfolk says, ‘where’s my first dish?’
‘Patience, my lord,’ he says.
He takes his own place, a humble three-legged stool, down at the end of the table. He gazes up at his betters. ‘In a moment the platters will come in. But first, shall we say a grace?’
He glances up at the beams. Up there are carved and painted the faces of the dead: More, Fisher, the cardinal, Katherine the queen. Below them, the flower of living England. Let us hope the roof doesn’t fall in.
The day after he, Thomas Cromwell, has exercised his imagination in this way, he feels the need to clarify his position, in the real world; and to add to the guest list. His daydream has not got as far as the actual feast, so he does not know what dishes he is going to offer. He must cook up something good, or the magnates will storm out, pulling off the cloth and kicking his servants.
So: he now speaks to the Seymours, privately yet plainly. ‘As long as the king holds by the queen that is now, I will hold by her too. But if he rejects her, I must reconsider.’
‘So you have no interest of your own in this?’ Edward Seymour says sceptically.
‘I represent the king’s interests. That is what I am for.’
Edward knows he will get no further. ‘Still…’ he says. Anne will soon be recovered from her mishap and Henry can have her back in bed, but it is clear that the prospect has not made him lose interest in Jane. The game has changed, and Jane must be repositioned. The challenge puts a glint in Seymour eyes. Now Anne has failed again, it is possible that Henry may wish to remarry. The whole court is talking of it. It is Anne Boleyn’s former success that allows them to imagine it.