The fee to the French executioner is over twenty-three pounds, but it is an expense unlikely to be repeated.
At Austin Friars, he takes the keys and lets himself into the little room where they store Christmas: where Mark was held, and where he cried out in fear in the night. The peacock wings will have to be destroyed. Rafe’s little girl will probably not ask for them again; children do not remember from one Christmas to the next.
When the wings are shaken out of their linen bag he stretches the fabric, holds it up to the light and sees that the bag is slit. He understands how the feathers crept out and stroked the dead man’s face. He sees that the wings are shabby, as if nibbled, and the glowing eyes dulled. They are tawdry things after all, not worth setting store by.
He thinks about his daughter Grace. He thinks, was my wife ever false to me? When I was away on the cardinal’s business as I so often was, did she take up with some silk merchant she knew through her business, or did she, as many women do, sleep with a priest? He can hardly believe it of her. Yet she was a plain woman, and Grace was so beautiful, her features so fine. They blur in his mind these days; this is what death does to you, it takes and takes, so that all that is left of your memories is a faint tracing of spilled ash.
He says to Johane, his wife’s sister, ‘Do you think Lizzie ever had to do with another man? I mean, while we were married?’
Johane is shocked. ‘Whatever put that into your head? Put it right out again.’
He tries to do that. But he cannot escape the feeling that Grace has slipped further from him. She was dead before she could be painted or drawn. She lived and left no trace. Her clothes and her cloth ball and her wooden baby in a smock are long ago passed to other children. But his elder daughter, Anne, he has her copy book. Sometimes he takes it out and looks at it, her name inked in her bold hand, Anne Cromwell, Anne Cromwell her book; the fish and birds she drew in the margin, mermaids and griffins. He keeps it in a wooden box faced and lined with red leather. On the lid the colour has faded to a pale rose. Only when you open it up do you see the original, shocking scarlet.
These light nights find him at his desk. Paper is precious. Its offcuts and remnants are not discarded, but turned over, reused. Often he takes up an old letter-book and finds the jottings of chancellors long dust, of bishop-ministers now cold under inscriptions of their merits. When he first, in this fashion, turned up Wolsey’s hand after his death – a hasty computation, a discarded draft – his heart had clenched small and he had to put down his pen till the spasm of grief passed. He has grown used to these encounters, but tonight, as he flicks over the leaf and sees the cardinal’s writing, it is strange to him, as if some trick, perhaps a trick of the light, has altered the letter forms. The hand could be that of a stranger, of a creditor or a debtor you have dealt with just this quarter and don’t know well; it could be that of some humble clerk, taking dictation from his master.
A moment passes: a soft flicker of the beeswax flame, a nudge of the book towards the light, and the words take on their familiar contours, so he can see the dead hand that inscribed them. During daylight hours he thinks only of the future, but sometimes late at night memory comes to nag him. However. His next task is somehow to reconcile the king and the Lady Mary, to save Henry from killing his own daughter; and before that, to stop Mary’s friends from killing him. He has helped them to their new world, the world without Anne Boleyn, and now they will think they can do without Cromwell too. They have eaten his banquet and now they will want to sweep him out with the rushes and the bones. But this was his table: he runs on the top of it, among the broken meats. Let them try to pull him down. They will find him armoured, they will find him entrenched, they will find him stuck like a limpet to the future. He has laws to write, measures to take, the good of the commonwealth to serve, and his king: he has titles and honours still to attain, houses to build, books to read, and who knows, perhaps children to father, and Gregory to dispose in marriage. It would be some compensation for the children lost, to have a grandchild. He imagines standing in a daze of light, holding up a small child so the dead can see it.
He thinks, strive as I might, one day I will be gone and as this world goes it may not be long: what though I am a man of firmness and vigour, fortune is mutable and either my enemies will do for me or my friends. When the time comes I may vanish before the ink is dry. I will leave behind me a great mountain of paper, and those who come after me – let us say it is Rafe, let us say it is Wriothesley, let us say it is Riche – they will sift through what remains and remark, here is an old deed, an old draft, an old letter from Thomas Cromwell’s time: they will turn the page over, and write on me.
Summer, 1536: he is promoted Baron Cromwell. He cannot call himself Lord Cromwell of Putney. He might laugh. However. He can call himself Baron Cromwell of Wimbledon. He ranged all over those fields, when he was a boy.
The word ‘however’ is like an imp coiled beneath your chair. It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen, and lines to march across the page and overshoot the margin. There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.
Author’s Note
The circumstances surrounding the fall of Anne Boleyn have been controversial for centuries. The evidence is complex and sometimes contradictory; the sources are often dubious, tainted and after-the-fact. There is no official transcript of her trial, and we can reconstruct her last days only in fragments, with the help of contemporaries who may be inaccurate, biased, forgetful, elsewhere at the time, or hiding under a pseudonym. Eloquent and lengthy speeches, put into Anne’s mouth at her trial and on the scaffold, should be read with scepticism, and so should the document often called her ‘last letter’, which is almost certainly a forgery or (to put it more kindly) a fiction. A mercurial woman, elusive in her lifetime, Anne is still changing centuries after her death, carrying the projections of those who read and write about her.
In this book I try to show how a few crucial weeks might have looked from Thomas Cromwell’s point of view. I am not claiming authority for my version; I am making the reader a proposal, an offer. Some familiar aspects of the story are not to be found in this novel. To limit the multiplication of characters, it omits mention of a deceased lady called Bridget Wingfield, who may (from beyond the grave) have had something to do with the rumours that began to circulate against Anne before her fall. The effect of omitting any source of rumour may be to throw more blame on Jane, Lady Rochford, than perhaps she deserves; we tend to read Lady Rochford backwards, as we know the destructive role she played in the affairs of Katherine Howard, Henry’s fifth wife. Julia Fox has given a more positive reading of Jane’s character in her book Jane Boleyn (2007).
Connoisseurs of Anne’s last days will notice other omissions, including that of Richard Page, a courtier who was arrested at about the same time as Thomas Wyatt, and who was never charged or tried. As he plays no part in this story otherwise, and as no one has an idea why he was arrested, it seemed best not to burden the reader with one more name.
I am indebted to the work of Eric Ives, David Loades, Alison Weir, G.W. Bernard, Retha M. Warnicke and many other historians of the Boleyns and their downfall.
This book is of course not about Anne Boleyn or about Henry VIII, but about the career of Thomas Cromwell, who is still in need of attention from biographers. Meanwhile, Mr Secretary remains sleek, plump and densely inaccessible, like a choice plum in a Christmas pie; but I hope to continue my efforts to dig him out.
Acknowledgements
I am truly grateful to the open-minded historians who took the time to read Wolf Hall, to comment on it and encourage this project, and to the many readers who have contacted me with family trees and snippets of family legend, with piquant information about lost places and almost forgotten names. Thank you to Sir Bob Worcester for showing me Allington Castle, once owned by the Wyatt family, and to Rupert Thistlethwayte, descendant of William Paulet, for inviting
me to Cadhay, his beautiful house in Devon. And thank you to all those people who have issued kind invitations I hope to take up in the course of writing my next novel.
I owe special gratitude to my husband Gerald McEwen, who has to share a house with so many invisible people, and who never fails in his support and practical kindness.
About the Author
HILARY MANTEL is the bestselling author of ten previous novels, including Wolf Hall, which won the 2009 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Among her novels are A Change of Climate, A Place of Greater Safety, Beyond Black, and Eight Months on Ghazzah Street. She has also written a memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. The winner of the 2006 Hawthornden Prize, her reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books. Mantel lives in England with her husband.
Also by Hilary Mantel
Every Day Is Mother’s Day
Vacant Possession
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street
Fludd
A Place of Greater Safety
A Change of Climate
An Experiment in Love
The Giant, O’Brien
Learning to Talk
Beyond Black
Wolf Hall
NON-FICTION
Giving Up the Ghost
Also by
Hilary Mantel
The Bestselling Author of Wolf Hall,
Winner of the Man Booker Prize
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Wolf Hall
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In the ruthless arena of King Henry VIII’s court, only one man dares to gamble his life to win the king’s favor and ascend to the heights of political power.
England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. The quest for the king’s freedom destroys his adviser, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum.
Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell is a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people and a demon of energy: he is also a consummate politician, hardened by his personal losses, implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?
In inimitable style, Hilary Mantel presents a picture of a half-made society on the cusp of change, where individuals fight or embrace their fate with passion and courage. With a vast array of characters, overflowing with incident, the novel re-creates an era when the personal and political are separated by a hairbreadth, where success brings unlimited power but a single failure means death.
Henry Holt and Company, LLC
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Copyright © 2012 by Hilary Mantel
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mantel, Hilary, 1952-
Bring up the bodies: a novel / Hilary Mantel.—1
p. cm.
“A John Macrae book.”
Sequel to: Wolf Hall.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-4765-7
1. Cromwell, Thomas, Earl of Essex, 1485?-1540--Fiction. 2. Great Britain--History--Henry VIII, 1509-1547--Fiction. I. Title.
PR6063.A438B75 2012
823’.914--dc23
2012006335
Originally published in the U.K. in 2012 by Fourth Estate
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
MORE FROM BOOKER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR HILARY MANTEL
“Mantel is at her best when turning her penetrating novelistic gaze to history…. Her abilities to channel the life and lexicon of the past are nothing short of astonishing.” —Ross King, Los Angeles Times
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“More people really need to get with the concept that Mantel is one of the best writers in England.” —Zadie Smith
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Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies
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