Sir Nicholas Carew comes to see him. The very fibres of his beard are bristling with conspiracy. He half-expects the knight to wink as he sits down.
When it comes to it, Carew is surprisingly brisk. ‘We want the concubine ousted. We know you want it too.’
‘We?’
Carew looks up at him, from beneath bristling brows; like a man who has shot off his one crossbow bolt, he must now plod over the terrain, seeking friend or foe or just a place to hide for the night. Ponderously, he clarifies. ‘My friends in this matter do comprise a good part of the ancient nobility of this nation, those of honourable lineage, and…’ He sees Cromwell’s face and hurries on. ‘I speak of those very near the throne, those in the line of old King Edward. Lord Exeter, the Courtenay family. Also Lord Montague and his brother Geoffrey Pole. Lady Margaret Pole, who as you know was governor to the Princess Mary.’
He casts up his eyes. ‘Lady Mary.’
‘If you must. We call her the princess.’
He nods. ‘We will not let that stop us discussing her.’
‘Those I have named,’ Carew says, ‘are the principal persons on whose behalf I speak, but as you will be aware, the most part of England would rejoice to see the king free of her.’
‘I don’t think the most part of England knows or cares.’ Carew means, of course, the most part of my England, the England of ancient blood. Any other country, for Sir Nicholas, does not exist.
He says, ‘I suppose Exeter’s wife Gertrude is active in this matter.’
‘She has been,’ Carew leans forward to impart something very secret, ‘in communication with Mary.’
‘I know,’ he sighs.
‘You read their letters?’
‘I read everybody’s letters.’ Including yours. ‘But look,’ he says, ‘this smells of intrigue against the king himself, does it not?’
‘In no wise. His honour is at the heart of it.’
He nods. Point taken. ‘And so? What do you require of me?’
‘We require you to join with us. We are content to have Seymour’s girl crowned. The young woman is my kin, and she is known to favour true religion. We believe she will bring Henry back to Rome.’
‘A cause close to my heart,’ he murmurs.
Sir Nicholas leans forward. ‘This is our difficulty, Cromwell. You are a Lutheran.’
He touches his jacket: round about his heart. ‘No, sir, I am a banker. Luther condemns to Hell those who lend at interest. Is it likely that I should take his part?’
Sir Nicholas laughs heartily. ‘I did not know. Where would we be, without Cromwell to lend us money?’
He asks, ‘What is to happen to Anne Boleyn?’
‘I don’t know. Convent?’
So the bargain is struck and sealed: he, Cromwell, is to assist the old families, the true faithful; and afterwards, under the new regime, they will keep his services in consideration: his zeal in this matter may cause them to forget the blasphemies of these last three years, which otherwise would invite condign punishment.
‘Just one thing, Cromwell.’ Carew stands up. ‘Don’t keep me waiting next time. It ill becomes a man of your stamp to keep a man of my stamp kicking his heels in an anteroom.’
‘Ah, was that the noise?’ Though Carew wears the padded satin of the courtier, he always imagines him in show-armour: not the kind you fight in, the kind you buy from Italy to impress your friends. Heel-kicking would be a noisy business, then: clatter, clang. He looks up. ‘I meant no slight, Sir Nicholas. From now we will make all speed. Consider me at your right hand, furnished for the fight.’
That’s the sort of bombast Carew understands.
Now Fitzwilliam is talking to Carew. Carew is talking to his wife, who is Francis Bryan’s sister. His wife is talking, or writing at least, to Mary to let her know that her prospects are improving by the hour, that La Ana may be displaced. At the very least, it’s a way of keeping Mary quiet for the while. He doesn’t want her to hear the rumours that Anne is launching fresh hostilities. She may panic, and try to escape; they say she has various absurd plans, like drugging the Boleyn women about her and spurring off by night. He has warned Chapuys, though not in so many words of course, that if Mary does escape Henry is likely to hold him responsible, and to have no regard for the protection of his diplomatic status. At the very least, he will be booted around like Sexton the jester. At worst, he may never see his native shores again.
Francis Bryan is keeping the Seymours at Wolf Hall abreast of events at court. Fitzwilliam and Carew are talking to the Marquis of Exeter, and Gertrude, his wife. Gertrude is talking over supper to the Imperial ambassador, and to the Pole family, who are as papist as they dare to be, who have teetered on the edge of treason these last four years. No one is talking to the French ambassador. But everyone is talking to him, Thomas Cromwell.
In sum, this is the question his new friends are asking: if Henry can retire one wife, and she a daughter of Spain, can he not give a pension to Boleyn’s daughter and put her away in some country house, having found defects in the marriage documents? His casting off of Katherine, after twenty years of marriage, offended all Europe. The marriage with Anne is recognised nowhere but in this realm, and has not endured three years; he could annul it, as a folly. After all, he has his own church to do so, his own archbishop.
In his head he rehearses a request. ‘Sir Nicholas? Sir William? Will you come to my humble house to dine?’
He does not really mean to ask them. Word would soon reach the queen. A coded glance is enough, a nod and a wink. But once again in his mind he sets the table.
Norfolk at the head. Montague and his sainted mother. Courtenay and his blasted wife. Sliding in behind them, our friend Monsieur Chapuys. ‘Oh, dammit,’ Norfolk sulks, ‘now must we speak French?’
‘I will translate,’ he offers. But who’s this clattering in? It’s Duke Dishpan. ‘Welcome, my lord Suffolk,’ he says. ‘Take a seat. Careful not to get crumbs in that great beard of yours.’
‘If there were a crumb.’ Norfolk is hungry.
Margaret Pole spears him with a glacial stare. ‘You have set a table. You have given us all seats. You have given us no napery.’
‘My apologies.’ He calls for a servant. ‘You wouldn’t want to get your hands dirty.’
Margaret Pole shakes out her napkin. On it is imprinted the face of the dead Katherine.
A bawling comes from without, the direction of the buttery. Francis Bryan reels in, already a bottle to the good. ‘Pastime with good company…’ He crashes to his place.
Now he, Cromwell, nods to his menials. Extra stools are fetched. ‘Squeeze them in,’ he says.
Carew and Fitzwilliam enter. They take their places without a smile or a nod. They have come ready to the feast, their knives in their hands.
He looks around at his guests. All are prepared. A Latin grace; English would be his choice, but he will suit his company. Who cross themselves ostentatiously, in papist style. Who look at him, expectant.
He shouts for the waiters. The doors burst open. Sweating men heave the platters to the table. It seems the meat is fresh, in fact not slaughtered yet.
It is just a minor breach of etiquette. The company must sit and salivate.
The Boleyns are laid at his hand to be carved.
Now that Rafe is in the privy chamber, he has closer acquaintance with the musician, Mark Smeaton, who has been promoted among the grooms. When Mark first showed himself at the cardinal’s door, he sloped up in patched boots and a canvas doublet that had belonged to a bigger man. The cardinal put him into worsted, but since he joined the royal household he goes in damask, perched on a fine gelding with a saddle of Spanish leather, the reins clutched in gold-fringed gloves. Where is the money coming from? Anne is recklessly generous, Rafe says. The gossip is that she has given Francis Weston a sum to keep his creditors at bay.
You can understand, Rafe says, that because now the king does not admire the queen so much, she is keen to have young m
en about her who hang on her words. Her rooms are busy thoroughfares, the privy chamber gentlemen constantly calling in on this errand or that, and lingering to play a game or share a song; where there is no message to carry, they invent one.
Those gentlemen who are less in the queen’s favour are keen to talk to the newcomer and give him all the gossip. And some things he doesn’t need to be told, he can see and hear for himself. Whispering and scuffling behind doors. Covert mockery of the king. Of his clothes, of his music. Hints of his shortcomings in bed. Where would those hints come from, but the queen?
There are some men who talk all the time about their horses. This is a steady mount but I used to have one speedier; that’s a fine filly you have there, but you should see this bay I have my eye on. With Henry, it’s ladies: he finds something to like in almost any female who crosses his path, and will scratch up a compliment for her, though she be plain and old and sour. With the young ones, he is enraptured twice a day: has she not the finest eyes, is not her throat white, her voice sweet, her hand shapely? Generally it’s look and don’t touch: the most he will venture, blushing slightly, ‘Don’t you think she must have pretty little duckies?’
One day Rafe hears Weston’s voice in the next room, running on, amused, in imitation of the king: ‘Has she not the wettest cunt you ever groped?’ Giggles, complicit sniggers. And ‘Hush! Cromwell’s spy is about.’
Harry Norris has been absent from court lately, spending time on his own estates. When he is on duty, Rafe says, he tries to suppress the talk, sometimes seems angry at it; but sometimes he lets himself smile. They talk about the queen and they speculate…
Go on, Rafe, he says.
Rafe doesn’t like telling this. He feels it is below him to be an eavesdropper. He thinks hard before he speaks. ‘The queen needs to conceive another child quickly to please the king, but where is it to come from, they ask. Since Henry cannot be trusted to do the business, which of them is to do him a favour?’
‘Did they come to any conclusion?’
Rafe rubs the crown of his head and makes his hair stand up. You know, he says, they would not really do it. None of them. The queen is sacred. It is too great a sin even for such lustful men as they be, and they are too much in fear of the king, surely, even though they mock him. Besides, she would not be so foolish.
‘I ask you again, did they come to any conclusion?’
‘I think it’s every man for himself.’
He laughs. ‘Sauve qui peut.’
He hopes none of this will be needed. If he acts against Anne he hopes for a cleaner way. It’s all foolish talk. But Rafe cannot unhear it, he cannot unknow it, there it is.
March weather, April weather, icy showers and splinters of sun; he meets Chapuys, indoors, this time.
‘You seem pensive, Master Secretary. Come to the fire.’
He shakes away the raindrops from his hat. ‘I have a weight on my mind.’
‘Do you know, I think you only set up these meetings with me to annoy the French ambassador?’
‘Oh yes,’ he sighs, ‘he is very jealous. In truth I would visit you more often, except that word always gets back to the queen. And she contrives to use it against me in one way or another.’
‘I could wish you a more gracious mistress.’ The ambassador’s implicit question: how is that going, the getting of a new mistress? Chapuys has floated to him, could there not be a new treaty between our sovereigns? Something that would safeguard Mary, her interests, perhaps place her back in the line of succession, after any children Henry might have with a new wife? Assuming, of course, the present queen were gone?
‘Ah, Lady Mary.’ Lately he has taken to putting his hand to his hat when her name is mentioned. He can see the ambassador is touched by this, he can see him preparing to put it in dispatches. ‘The king is willing to hold formal talks. It would please him to be united in friendship to the Emperor. So much he has said.’
‘Now you must bring him to the point.’
‘I have influence with the king but I cannot answer for him, no subject can. This is my difficulty. To succeed with him, one must anticipate his desires. But one then stands exposed, should he change his mind.’
Wolsey his master had advised, make him say what he wants, do not guess, for by guessing you may destroy yourself. But perhaps, since Wolsey’s day, the king’s unexpressed commands have become harder to ignore. He fills the room with a seething discontent, stares up into the sky when you ask him to sign a paper: as if he were expecting deliverance.
‘You fear he will turn on you,’ Chapuys says.
‘He will, I suppose. One day.’
Sometimes he wakes in the night and thinks of it. There are courtiers who have honourably retired. He can think of instances. Of course, it is the other kind that loom larger, if you are wakeful around midnight. ‘But if that day comes,’ the ambassador says, ‘what will you do?’
‘What can I do? Arm myself with patience and leave the rest to God.’ And hope the end is quick.
‘Your piety does you credit,’ Chapuys says. ‘If fortune turns against you, you will need friends. The Emperor –’
‘The Emperor would not spare a thought for me, Eustache. Or for any common man. No one raised a finger to help the cardinal.’
‘The poor cardinal. I wish I had known him better.’
‘Stop buttering me up,’ he says sharply. ‘Have done.’
Chapuys gives him a searching glance. The fire roars up. Vapours rise from his clothes. The rain patters at the window. He shivers. ‘You are ill?’ Chapuys enquires.
‘No, I am not allowed to be. If I took to my bed the queen would turn me out of it and say I am faking. If you want to cheer me up, get out that Christmas hat of yours. It was a pity you had to put it away for mourning. Easter would be none too soon to see it again.’
‘I think you are making jokes, Thomas, at the expense of my hat. I have heard that while it was in your custody it was derided, not only by your clerks but by your stable boys and dog-keepers.’
‘The reverse is true. There were many applications to try it on. I wish that we may see it at all major feasts of the church.’
‘Once again,’ Chapuys says, ‘your piety does you credit.’
He sends Gregory away to his friend Richard Southwell, to learn the art of speaking in public. It is good for him to get out of London, and to get away from the court, where the atmosphere is tense. All around him there are signs of unease, little huddles of courtiers that disperse at his approach. If he is to place all in hazard, and he thinks he is, then Gregory should not have to go through the pain and doubt, hour by hour. Let him hear the conclusion of events; he does not need to live through them. He has no time now to explain the world to the simple and the young. He has to watch the movements of cavalry and ordnance across Europe, and the ships on the seas, merchantmen and men of war: the influx of gold from the Americas to the treasury of the Emperor. Sometimes peace looks like war, you cannot tell them apart; sometimes these islands look very small. The word from Europe is that Mount Etna has erupted, and brought floods throughout Sicily. In Portugal there is a drought; and everywhere, envy and contention, fear of the future, fear of hunger or the fact of it, fear of God and doubt over how to placate him, and in what language. The news, when he gets it, is always a fortnight out of date: the posts are slow, the tides against him. Just as the work of fortifying Dover is coming to an end, the walls of Calais are falling down; frost has cracked the masonry and opened a fissure between Watergate and Lanterngate.
On Passion Sunday a sermon is preached in the king’s chapel by Anne’s almoner, John Skip. It appears to be an allegory; the force of it appears to be directed against him, Thomas Cromwell. He smiles broadly when those who attended explain it to him, sentence by sentence: his ill-wishers and well-wishers both. He is not a man to be knocked over by a sermon, or to feel himself persecuted by figures of speech.
Once when he was a boy he had been in a rage against his father Walt
er and he had rushed at him, intent to butt him in the belly with his head. But it was just before the Cornish rebels came swarming up the country, and as Putney reckoned it was in their line of march, Walter had been bashing out body armour for himself and his friends. So when he ran head-first, there was a bang, which he heard before he felt it. Walter was trying on one of his creations. ‘That’ll teach you,’ his father said, phlegmatic.
He often thinks about it, that iron belly. And he thinks he has got one, without the inconvenience and weight of metal. ‘Cromwell has plenty stomach,’ his friends say; his enemies too. They mean he has appetite, gusto, attack: first thing in the morning or last thing at night, a bloody collop of meat would not disgust him, and if you wake him in the small hours he is hungry then too.
An inventory comes in, from Tilney Abbey: vestments of red turkey satin and white lawn, wrought with beasts in gold. Two altar cloths of white Bruges satin, with drops like spots of blood, made of red velvet. And the contents of the kitchen: weights, tongs and fire forks, flesh hooks.
Winter melts into spring. Parliament is dissolved. Easter Day: lamb with ginger sauce, a blessed absence of fish. He remembers the eggs the children used to paint, giving each speckled shell a cardinal’s hat. He remembers his daughter Anne, her hot little hand cupped around the eggshell so the colour ran: ‘Look! Regardez!’ She was learning French that year. Then her amazed face; her curious tongue creeping out to lick the stain from her palm.
The Emperor is in Rome, and the word is that he has had a seven-hour meeting with the Pope; how much of that was devoted to plotting against England? Or did the Emperor speak up for his brother monarch? It is rumoured there will be an accord between the Emperor and the French: bad news for England, if so. Time to push on with negotiations. He sets up a meeting between Chapuys and Henry.