by Hilary Mante
Henry Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter, is the king's nearest male relative, being a grandson of old King Edward; hence, useful to the Emperor, when he comes with his troops to boot out Henry and put a new king on the throne. ‘If I were Exeter, I wouldn't let my wife dance attendance on some addle-witted girl who is feeding her fantasies that one day she will be queen.’ He begins to refold the papers. ‘This girl, you know, she claims she can raise the dead.’
At John Petyt's funeral, while the women are upstairs sitting with Lucy, he convenes an impromptu meeting downstairs at Lion's Quay, to talk to his fellow merchants about disorder in the city. Antonio Bonvisi, More's friend, excuses himself and says he will go home; ‘The Trinity bless and prosper you,’ he says, withdrawing and taking with him the mobile island of chill which has followed him since his unexpected arrival. ‘You know,’ he says, turning at the door, ‘if there is a question of help for Mistress Petyt, I shall be glad –’
‘No need. She is left wealthy.’
‘But will the city let her take the business on?’
He cuts him off: ‘I have that in hand.’
Bonvisi nods and goes out. ‘Surprising he should show his face.’ John Parnell, of the Drapers' Company, has a history of clashes with More. ‘Master Cromwell, if you are taking charge of this, does it mean – do you have it in mind to speak to Lucy?’
‘Me? No.’
Humphrey Monmouth says, ‘Shall we have our meeting first, and broker marriages later? We are concerned, Master Cromwell, as you must be, as the king must be … we are all, I think,’ he looks around, ‘we are all, now Bonvisi has left us, friendly to the cause for which our late brother Petyt was, in effect, a martyr, but it is for us to keep the peace, to disassociate ourselves from outbreaks of blasphemy …’
In one city parish last Sunday, at the sacred moment of the elevation of the host, and just as the priest pronounced, ‘hoc est enim corpus meum,’ there was an outbreak of chanting, ‘hoc est corpus, hocus pocus.’ And in an adjacent parish, at the commemoration of the saints, where the priest requires us to remember our fellowship with the holy martyrs, ‘cum Joanne, Stephano, Mathia, Barnaba, Ignatio, Alexandro, Marcellino, Petro …’ some person had shouted out, ‘and don't forget me and my cousin Kate, and Dick with his cockle-barrel on Leadenhall, and his sister Susan and her little dog Posset.’
He puts his hand over his mouth. ‘If Posset needs a lawyer, you know where I am.’
‘Master Cromwell,’ says a crabbed elder from the Skinners' Company, ‘you convened this gathering. Set us an example in gravity.’
‘There are ballads made,’ Monmouth says, ‘about Lady Anne – the words are not repeatable in this company. Thomas Boleyn's servants complain they are called names on the street. Ordure thrown on their livery. Masters must keep a hand on their apprentices. Disloyal talk should be reported.’
‘To whom?’
He says, ‘Try me.’
He finds Johane at Austin Friars. She has made some excuse to stay at home: a summer cold. ‘Ask me what secret I know,’ he says.
For appearances' sake, she polishes the tip of her nose. ‘Let me see. You know to a shilling what the king has in his treasury?’
‘I know to the farthing. Not that. Ask me. Sweet sister.’
When she has guessed enough, he tells her, ‘John Parnell is going to marry Luce.’
‘What? And John Petyt not cold?’ She turns away, to get over whatever she is feeling. ‘Your brethren stick together. Parnell's household is not clean from sectaries. He has a servant in Bishop Stokesley's prison, so I hear.’
Richard Cromwell puts his head around the door. ‘Master. The Tower. Bricks. Five shilling the thousand.’
‘No.’
‘Right.’
‘You'd think she'd marry a safer sort of man.’
He goes to the door. ‘Richard, come back.’ Turns to Johane. ‘I don't think she knows any.’
‘Sir?’
‘Get it down by sixpence, and check every batch. What you should do is choose a few in every load, and take a close interest in them.’
Johane in the room behind him: ‘Anyway, you did the wise thing.’
‘For instance, measure them … Johane, did you think I'd get married out of some sort of inadvertence? By accident?’
‘I'm sorry?’ Richard says.
‘Because if you keep measuring them, it throws brickmakers into a panic, and you'll see by their faces if they're trying any tricks.’
‘I expect you have some lady in view. At court. The king has given you a new office –’
‘Clerk of the Hanaper. Yes. A post in the chancery finances … It hardly signs the flowery trail to a love affair.’ Richard has gone, clattering downstairs. ‘Do you know what I think?’
‘You think you should wait. Till she, that woman, is queen.’
‘I think it's the transport that pushes the cost up. Even by barge. I should have cleared some ground and built my own kilns.’
Sunday, 1 September, at Windsor: Anne kneels before the king to receive the title of Marquess of Pembroke. The Garter knights in their stalls watch her, the noble ladies of England flank her, and (the duchess having refused, and spat out an oath at the suggestion) Norfolk's daughter Mary bears her coronet on a cushion; the Howards and the Boleyns are en fête. Monseigneur caresses his beard, nods and smiles as he receives murmured congratulations from the French ambassador. Bishop Gardiner reads out Anne's new title. She is vivid in red velvet and ermine, and her black hair falls, virgin-style, in snaky locks to her waist. He, Cromwell, has organised the income from fifteen manors to support her dignity.
A Te Deum is sung. A sermon is preached. When the ceremony is over, and the women stoop to pick up her train, he sees a flash of blue, like a kingfisher, and glances up to see John Seymour's little daughter among the Howard ladies. A warhorse raises his head at the sound of trumpets, and great ladies look up and smile; but as the musicians play a flourish, and the procession leaves St George's Chapel, she keeps her pale face down-turned, her eyes on her toes as if she fears tripping.
At the feast Anne sits beside Henry on the dais, and when she turns to speak to him her black lashes brush her cheeks. She is almost there now, almost there, her body taut like a bowstring, her skin dusted with gold, with tints of apricot and honey; when she smiles, which she does often, she shows small teeth, white and sharp. She is planning to commandeer Katherine's royal barge, she tells him, and have the device ‘H&K’ burned away, all Katherine's badges obliterated. The king has sent for Katherine's jewels, so she can wear them on the projected trip to France. He has spent an afternoon with her, two afternoons, three, in the fine September weather, with the king's goldsmith beside her making drawings, and he as master of the jewels adding suggestions; Anne wants new settings made. At first Katherine had refused to give up the jewels. She had said she could not part with the property of the Queen of England and put it into the hands of the disgrace of Christendom. It had taken a royal command to make her hand over the loot.
Anne refers everything to him; she says, laughing, ‘Cromwell, you are my man.’ The wind is set fair and the tide is running for him. He can feel the tug of it under his feet. His friend Audley must surely be confirmed as Chancellor; the king is getting used to him. Old courtiers have resigned, rather than serve Anne; the new comptroller of the household is Sir William Paulet, a friend of his from Wolsey days. So many of the new courtiers are his friends from Wolsey days. And the cardinal didn't employ fools.
After the Mass and Anne's installation, he attends the Bishop of Winchester as he disrobes, gets out of his canonicals into gear more suitable for secular celebrations. ‘Are you going to dance?’ he asks him. He sits on a stone window ledge, half-attentive to what is going on in the courts below, the musicians carrying in pipes and lutes, harps and rebecs, hautboys, viols and drums. ‘You could cut a good figure. Or don't you dance now you're a bishop?’
Stephen's conversation is on a track of its own. ‘You'd
think it would be enough for any woman, wouldn't you, to be made a marquess in her own right? She'll give way to him now. Heir in the belly, please God, before Christmas.’
‘Oh, you wish her success?’
‘I wish his temper soothed. And some result out of this. Not to do it all for nothing.’
‘Do you know what Chapuys is saying about you? That you keep two women in your household, dressed up as boys.’
‘Do I?’ He frowns. ‘Better, I suppose, than two boys dressed up as women. Now that would be opprobrious.’ Stephen gives a bark of laughter. They stroll together towards the feast. Trollylolly, the musicians sing. ‘Pastime with good company, I love and shall until I die.’ The soul is musical by nature, the philosophers say. The king calls up Thomas Wyatt to sing with him, and the musician Mark. ‘Alas, what shall I do for love? For love, alas, what shall I do?’
‘Anything he can think of,’ Gardiner says. ‘There is no limit, that I can see.’
He says, ‘The king is good to those who think him good.’ He floats it to the bishop, below the music.
‘Well,’ Gardiner says, ‘if your mind is infinitely flexible. As yours, I see, would have to be.’
He speaks to Mistress Seymour. ‘Look,’ she says. She holds up her sleeves. The bright blue with which she has edged them, that kingfisher flash, is cut from the silk in which he wrapped her present of needlework patterns. How do matters stand now at Wolf Hall, he asks, as tactfully as he can: how do you ask after a family, in the wake of incest? She says in her clear little voice, ‘Sir John is very well. But then Sir John is always very well.’
‘And the rest of you?’
‘Edward angry, Tom restless, my lady mother grinding her teeth and banging the doors. The harvest coming in, the apples on the bough, the maids in the dairy, our chaplain at his prayers, the hens laying, the lutes in tune, and Sir John … Sir John as always is very well. Why don't you make some business in Wiltshire and ride down to inspect us? Oh, and if the king gets a new wife, she will need matrons to attend her, and my sister Liz is coming to court. Her husband is the Governor of Jersey, you know him, Anthony Oughtred? I would rather go up-country to the queen, myself. But they say she is moving again, and her household is being reduced.’
‘If I were your father … no …’ he rephrases it, ‘if I were to advise you, it would be to serve Lady Anne.’
‘The marquess,’ she says. ‘Of course, it is good to be humble. She makes sure we are.’
‘Just now it is difficult for her. I think she will soften, when she has her heart's desire.’ Even as he says it, he knows it is not true.
Jane lowers her head, looks up at him from under her eyelids. ‘That is my humble face. Do you think it will serve?’
He laughs. ‘It would take you anywhere.’
When the dancers are resting, fanning themselves, from the galliards, pavanes and almanes, he and Wyatt sing the little soldiers' air: Scaramella to the war has gone, with his shield, his lance. It is melancholy, as songs are, whatever the words, when the light is failing and the human voice, unaccompanied, fades in the shadows of the room. Charles Brandon asks him, ‘What is it about, that song, is it about a lady?’
‘No, it is just about a boy who goes off to war.’
‘What are his fortunes?’
Scaramella fa la gala. ‘It's all one big holiday to him.’
‘Those were better days,’ the duke says. ‘Soldiering.’
The king sings to the lute, his voice strong, true, plangent: ‘As I Walked the Woods So Wild.’ Some women weep, a little the worse for strong Italian wines.
At Canterbury, Archbishop Warham lies cold on a slab; coins of the realm are laid on his eyelids, as if to seal into his brain for eternity the image of his king. He is waiting to go down under the pavement of the cathedral, in the dank charnel vacancy by Becket's bones. Anne sits still as a statue, her eyes on her lover. Only her restless fingers move; she clutches on her lap one of her little dogs, and her hands run over and over its fur, twisting its curls. As the last note dies, candles are brought in.
October, and we are going to Calais – a train two thousand strong, stretched from Windsor to Greenwich, from Greenwich across the green fields of Kent to Canterbury: to a duke an entourage of forty, to a marquess thirty-five, to an earl twenty-four, while a viscount must scrape by with twenty, and he with Rafe and any clerks he can pack into the ships' rat-holes. The king is to meet his brother France, who intends to oblige him by speaking to the Pope in favour of his new marriage. François has offered to marry one of his three sons – his three sons, how God must love him – to the Pope's niece, Catherine de' Medici; he says he will make it a precondition of the match that Queen Katherine is refused leave to appeal her case to Rome, and that his brother England is allowed to settle his marital affairs in his own jurisdiction, using his own bishops.
These two potent monarchs will see each other for the first time since the meeting called the Field of the Cloth of Gold, which the cardinal arranged. The king says the trip must cost less than that occasion, but when he is questioned on specifics he wants more of that and two of those – everything bigger, plusher, more lavish, and with more gilding. He is taking his own cooks and his own bed, his ministers and musicians, his horses, dogs and falcons, and his new marquess, whom Europe calls his concubine. He is taking the possible claimants to the throne, including the Yorkist Lord Montague, and the Lancastrian Nevilles, to show how tame they are and how secure are the Tudors. He is taking his gold plate, his linen, his pastry chefs and poultry-pickers and poison-taster, and he is even taking his own wine: which you might think is superfluous, but what do you know?
Rafe, helping him pack his papers: ‘I understand that King Francis will speak to Rome for the king's cause. But I am not sure what he gets out of this treaty.’
‘Wolsey always said that the making of a treaty is the treaty. It doesn't matter what the terms are, just that there are terms. It's the goodwill that matters. When that runs out, the treaty is broken, whatever the terms say.’
It is the processions that matter, the exchange of gifts, the royal games of bowls, the tilts, jousts and masques: these are not preliminaries to the process, they are the process itself. Anne, accustomed to the French court and French etiquette, sets out the difficulties in store. ‘If the Pope were to visit him, then France could advance towards him, perhaps meeting him in a courtyard. But two monarchs meeting, once they are in sight, should take the same number of steps towards each other. And this works, unless one monarch – hélas – were to take very small steps, forcing the other to cover the ground.’
‘By God,’ Charles Brandon bursts out, ‘such a man would be a knave. Would Francis do that?’
Anne looks at him, lids half-lowered. ‘My lord Suffolk, is your lady wife ready for the journey?’
Suffolk reddens. ‘My wife is a former Queen of France.’
‘I am aware of it. François will be pleased to see her again. He thought her very beautiful. Though of course, she was young then.’
‘My sister is beautiful still,’ Henry says, pacific. But a tempest is boiling up inside Charles Brandon, and it breaks with a yell like a crack of thunder: ‘You expect her to wait on you? On Boleyn's daughter? Pass you your gloves, madam, and serve you first at dinner? Make your mind up to it – that day will never come.’
Anne turns to Henry, her hand fastening on his arm. ‘Before your face he humiliates me.’
‘Charles,’ Henry says, ‘leave us now and come back when you are master of yourself. Not a moment before.’ He sighs, makes a sign: Cromwell, go after him.
The Duke of Suffolk is seething and steaming. ‘Fresh air, my lord,’ he suggests.
Autumn has come already; there is a raw wind from the river. It lifts a flurry of sodden leaves, which flap in their path like the flags of some miniature army. ‘I always think Windsor is a cold place. Don't you, my lord? I mean the situation, not just the castle?’ His voice runs on, soothing, low. ‘If I were the
king, I would spend more time at the palace in Woking. You know it never snows there? At least, not once in twenty years.’
‘If you were king?’ Brandon stumps downhill. ‘If Anne Boleyn can be queen, why not?’
‘I take that back. I should have used a more humble expression.’
Brandon grunts. ‘She will never appear, my wife, in the train of that harlot.’
‘My lord, you had better think her chaste. We all do.’
‘Her lady mother trained her up, and she was a great whore, let me tell you. Liz Boleyn, Liz Howard as was – she was the first to take Henry to bed. I know these things, I am his oldest friend. Seventeen, and he didn't know where to put it. His father kept him like a nun.’
‘But none of us believe that story now. About Monseigneur's wife.’
‘Monseigneur! Christ in Heaven.’
‘He likes to be called that. It is no harm.’
‘Her sister Mary trained her up, and Mary was trained in a brothel. Do you know what they do, in France? My lady wife told me. Well, not told me, but she wrote it down for me, in Latin. The man has a cock-stand, and she takes it in her mouth! Can you imagine such a thing? A woman who can do such a filthy proceeding, can you call that a virgin?’
‘My lord … if your wife will not go to France, if you cannot persuade her … shall we say that she is ill? It would be something you could do for the king, whom you know is your friend. It would save him from –’ He almost says, from the lady's harsh tongue. But he backs out of that sentence, and says something else. ‘It would save face.’
Brandon nods. They are still heading towards the river, and he tries to check their pace because soon Anne will expect him back with news of an apology. When the duke turns to him, his face is a picture of misery. ‘It's true, anyway. She is ill. Her beautiful little’ – he makes a gesture, his hands cupping the air – ‘all fallen away. I love her anyway. She's as thin as a wafer. I say to her, Mary, I will wake up one day, and I won't be able to find you, I'll take you for a thread in the bed linen.’