by Hilary Mante
‘An oath?’ Gardiner says. ‘What sort of legislation needs to be confirmed by an oath?’
‘You will always find those who will say a parliament is misled, or bought, or in some way incapable of representing the commonwealth. Again, you will find those who will deny Parliament's competence to legislate in certain matters, saying they must be left to some other jurisdiction – to Rome, in effect. But I think that is a mistake. Rome has no legitimate voice in England. In my bill I mean to state a position. It is a modest one. I draft it, it may please Parliament to pass it, it may please the king to sign it. I shall then ask the country to endorse it.’
‘So what will you do?’ Stephen says, jeering. ‘Have your boys from Austin Friars up and down the land, swearing every man Jack you dig out of an alehouse? Every man Jack and every Jill?’
‘Why should I not swear them? Do you think because they are not bishops they are brutes? One Christian's oath is as good as another's. Look at any part of this kingdom, my lord bishop, and you will find dereliction, destitution. There are men and women on the roads. The sheep farmers are grown so great that the little man is knocked off his acres and the ploughboy is out of house and home. In a generation these people can learn to read. The ploughman can take up a book. Believe me, Gardiner, England can be otherwise.’
‘I have made you angry,’ Gardiner observes. ‘Provoked, you mistake the question. I asked you not if their word is good, but how many of them you propose to swear. But of course, in the Commons you have brought in a bill against sheep –’
‘Against the runners of sheep,’ he says, smiling.
The king says, ‘Gardiner, it is to help the common people – no grazier to run more than two thousand animals –’
The bishop cuts his king off as if he were a child. ‘Two thousand, yes, so while your commissioners are rampaging through the shires counting sheep, perhaps they can swear the shepherds at the same time, eh? And these ploughboys of yours, in their preliterate condition? And any drabs they find in a ditch?’
He has to laugh. The bishop is so vehement. ‘My lord, I will swear whoever is necessary to make the succession safe, and unite the country behind us. The king has his officers, his justices of the peace – and the lords of the council will be put on their honour to make this work, or I will know why.’
Henry says, ‘The bishops will take the oath. I hope they will be conformable.’
‘We want some new bishops,’ Anne says. She names her friend Hugh Latimer. His friend, Rowland Lee. It seems after all she does have a list, which she carries in her head. Liz made preserves. Anne makes pastors.
‘Latimer?’ Stephen shakes his head, but he cannot accuse the queen, to her face, of loving heretics. ‘Rowland Lee, to my certain knowledge, has never stood in a pulpit in his life. Some men come into the religious life only for ambition.’
‘And have barely the grace to disguise it,’ he says.
‘I make the best of my road,’ Stephen says. ‘I was set upon it. By God, Cromwell, I walk it.’
He looks up at Anne. Her eyes sparkle with glee. Not a word is lost on her.
Henry says, ‘My lord Winchester, you have been out of the country a great while, on your embassy.’
‘I hope Your Majesty thinks it has been to his profit.’
‘Indeed, but you have not been able to avoid neglecting your diocese.’
‘As a pastor, you should mind your flock,’ Anne says. ‘Count them, perhaps.’
He bows. ‘My flock is safe in fold.’
Short of kicking the bishop downstairs himself, or having him hauled out by the guards, the king can't do much more. ‘All the same, feel free to attend to it,’ Henry murmurs.
There is a feral stink that rises from the hide of a dog about to fight. It rises now into the room, and he sees Anne turn aside, fastidious, and Stephen put his hand to his chest, as if to ruffle up his fur, to warn of his size before he bares his teeth. ‘I shall be back with Your Majesty within a week,’ he says. His dulcet sentiment comes out as a snarl from the depth of his guts.
Henry bursts into laughter. ‘Meanwhile we like Cromwell. Cromwell treats us very well.’
Once Winchester has gone, Anne hangs over the king again; her eyes flick sideways, as if she were drawing him into conspiracy. Anne's bodice is still tight-laced, only a slight fullness of her breasts indicating her condition. There has been no announcement; announcements are never made, women's bodies are uncertain things and mistakes can occur. But the whole court is sure she is carrying the heir, and she says so herself; apples are not mentioned this time, and all the foods she craved when she was carrying the princess revolt her, so the signs are good it will be a boy. This bill he will bring into the Commons is not, as she thinks, some anticipation of disaster, but a confirmation of her place in the world. She must be thirty-three this year. For how many years did he laugh at her flat chest and yellow skin? Even he can see her beauty, now she is queen. Her face seems sculpted in the purity of its lines, her skull small like a cat's; her throat has a mineral glitter, as if it were powdered with fool's gold.
Henry says, ‘Stephen is a resolute ambassador, no doubt, but I cannot keep him near me. I have trusted him with my innermost councils, and now he turns.’ He shakes his head. ‘I hate ingratitude. I hate disloyalty. That is why I value a man like you. You were good to your old master in his trouble. Nothing could commend you more to me, than that.’ He speaks as if he, personally, hadn't caused the trouble; as if Wolsey's fall were caused by a thunderbolt. ‘Another who has disappointed me is Thomas More.’
Anne says, ‘When you write your bill against the false prophetess Barton, put More in it, beside Fisher.’
He shakes his head. ‘It won't run. Parliament won't have it. There is plenty of evidence against Fisher, and the Commons don't like him, he talks to them as if they were Turks. But More came to me even before Barton was arrested and showed me how he was clear in the matter.’
‘But it will frighten him,’ Anne says. ‘I want him frightened. Fright may unmake a man. I have seen it occur.’
* * *
Three in the afternoon: candles brought in. He consults Richard's day-book: John Fisher is waiting. It is time to be enraged. He tries thinking about Gardiner, but he keeps laughing. ‘Arrange your face,’ Richard says.
‘You'd never imagine that Stephen owed me money. I paid for his installation at Winchester.’
‘Call it in, sir.’
‘But I have already taken his house for the queen. He is still grieving. I had better not drive him to an extremity. I ought to leave him a way back.’
Bishop Fisher is seated, his skeletal hands resting on an ebony cane. ‘Good evening, my lord,’ he says. ‘Why are you so gullible?’
The bishop seems surprised that they are not to start off with a prayer. Nevertheless, he murmurs a blessing.
‘You had better ask the king's pardon. Beg the favour of it. Plead with him to consider your age and infirmities.’
‘I do not know my offence. And, whatever you think, I am not in my second childhood.’
‘But I believe you are. How else would you have given credence to this woman Barton? If you came across a puppet show in the street, would you not stand there cheering, and shout, “Look at their little wooden legs walking, look how they wave their arms? Hear them blow their trumpets”. Would you not?’
‘I don't think I ever saw a puppet show,’ Fisher says sadly. ‘At least, not one of the kind of which you speak.’
‘But you're in one, my lord bishop! Look around you. It's all one great puppet show.’
‘And yet so many did believe in her,’ Fisher says mildly. ‘Warham himself, Canterbury that was. A score, a hundred of devout and learned men. They attested her miracles. And why should she not voice her knowledge, being inspired? We know that before the Lord goes to work, he gives warning of himself through his servants, for it is stated by the prophet Amos …’
‘Don't prophet Amos me, man. She threatened the kin
g. Foresaw his death.’
‘Foreseeing it is not the same as desiring it, still less plotting it.’
‘Ah, but she never foresaw anything that she didn't hope would happen. She sat down with the king's enemies and told them how it would be.’
‘If you mean Lord Exeter,’ the bishop says, ‘he is already pardoned, of course, and so is Lady Gertrude. If they were guilty, the king would have proceeded.’
‘That does not follow. Henry wishes for reconciliation. He finds it in him to be merciful. As he may be to you even yet, but you must admit your faults. Exeter has not been writing against the king, but you have.’
‘Where? Show me.’
‘Your hand is disguised, my lord, but not from me. Now you will publish no more.’ Fisher's glance shoots upwards. Delicately, his bones move beneath his skin; his fist grips his cane, the handle of which is a gilded dolphin. ‘Your printers abroad are working for me now. My friend Stephen Vaughan has offered them a better rate.’
‘It is about the divorce you are hounding me,’ Fisher says. ‘It is not about Elizabeth Barton. It is because Queen Katherine asked my counsel and I gave it.’
‘You say I am hounding you, when I ask you to keep within the law? Do not try to lead me away from your prophetess, or I will lead you where she is and lock you up next door to her. Would you have been so keen to believe her, if in one of her visions she had seen Anne crowned queen a year before it occurred, and Heaven smiling down on the event? In that case, I put it to you, you would have called her a witch.’
Fisher shakes his head; he retreats into bafflement. ‘I always wondered, you know, it has puzzled me many a year, if in the gospels Mary Magdalene was the same Mary who was Martha's sister. Elizabeth Barton told me for a certainty she was. In the whole matter, she didn't hesitate.’
He laughs. ‘Oh, she's familiar with these people. She's in and out of their houses. She's shared a bowl of pottage many a time with our Blessed Lady. Look now, my lord, holy simplicity was well enough in its day, but its day is over. We're at war. Just because the Emperor's soldiers aren't running down the street, don't deceive yourself – this is a war and you are in the enemy camp.’
The bishop is silent. He sways a little on his stool. Sniffs. ‘I see why Wolsey retained you. You are a ruffian and so was he. I have been a priest forty years, and I have never seen such ungodly men as those who flourish today. Such evil councillors.’
‘Fall ill,’ he says. ‘Take to your bed. That's what I recommend.’
The bill of attainder against the Maid and her allies is laid before the House of Lords on a Saturday morning, 21 February. Fisher's name is in it and so, at Henry's command, is More's. He goes to the Tower to see the woman Barton, to see if she has anything else to get off her conscience before her death is scheduled.
She has survived the winter, trailed across country to her outdoor confessions, standing exposed on scaffolds in the cutting wind. He brings a candle in with him, and finds her slumped on her stool like a badly tied bundle of rags; the air is both cold and stale. She looks up and says, as if they were resuming a conversation, ‘Mary Magdalene told me I should die.’
Perhaps, he thinks, she has been talking to me in her head. ‘Did she give you a date?’
‘You'd find that helpful?’ she asks. He wonders if she knows that Parliament, indignant over More's inclusion, could delay the bill against her till spring. ‘I'm glad you've come, Master Cromwell. Nothing happens here.’
Not even his most prolonged, his most subtle interrogations had frightened her. To get Katherine pulled into it, he had tried every trick he knew: with no result. He says, ‘You are fed properly, are you?’
‘Oh yes. And my laundry done. But I miss it, when I used to go to Lambeth, see the archbishop, I liked that. Seeing the river. All the people bustling along, and the boats unloading. Do you know if I shall be burned? Lord Audley said I would be burned.’ She speaks as if Audley were an old friend.
‘I hope you can be spared that. It is for the king to say.’
‘I go to Hell these nights,’ she says. ‘Master Lucifer shows me a chair. It is carved of human bones and padded with cushions of flame.’
‘Is it for me?’
‘Bless you, no. For the king.’
‘Any sightings of Wolsey?’
‘The cardinal's where I left him.’ Seated among the unborn. She pauses; a long drifting pause. ‘They say it can take an hour for the body to burn. Mother Mary will exalt me. I shall bathe in the flames, as one bathes in a fountain. To me, they will be cool.’ She looks into his face but at his expression she turns away. ‘Sometimes they pack gunpowder in the wood, don't they? Makes it quick then. How many will be going with me?’
Six. He names them. ‘It could have been sixty. Do you know that? Your vanity brought them here.’
As he says it he thinks, it is also true that their vanity brought her: and he sees that she would have preferred sixty to die, to see Exeter and the Pole family pulled down to disgrace; it would have sealed her fame. That being so, why would she not name Katherine as party to the plot? What a triumph that would be for a prophet, to ruin a queen. There, he thinks, I shouldn't have been so subtle after all; I should have played on her greed to be infamous. ‘Shall I not see you again?’ she says. ‘Or will you be there, when I suffer?’
‘This throne,’ he says. ‘This chair of bones. It would be as well to keep it to yourself. Not to let the king hear of it.’
‘I think he ought. He should have warning of what is waiting for him after death. And what can he do to me, worse than he already plans?’
‘You don't want to plead your belly?’
She blushes. ‘I'm not with child. You're laughing at me.’
‘I would advise anyone to get a few more weeks of life, by any means they can. Say you have been ill-used on the road. Say your guards have dishonoured you.’
‘But then I would have to say who did it, and they would be taken before a judge.’
He shakes his head, pitying her. ‘When a guard despoils a prisoner, he doesn't leave her his name.’
Anyway, she doesn't like his idea, that's plain. He leaves her. The Tower is like a small town and its morning routine clatters on around him, the guards and the men from the Mint greet him, and the keeper of the king's beasts trots up to say it's dinner time – they eat early, the beasts – and does he want to see them fed? I take it very kindly, he says, waiving the pleasure; unbreakfasted himself, slightly nauseous, he can smell stale blood and from the direction of their cages hear their truffling grunts and smothered roars. High up on the walls above the river, out of sight, a man is whistling an old tune, and at the refrain breaks into song; he is a jolly forester, he sings. Which is most certainly untrue.
He looks around for his boatmen. He wonders whether the Maid is ill, and whether she will live to be killed. She was never harmed in his custody, only harassed; kept awake a night or two, but no longer than the king's business keeps him awake, and you don't, he thinks, find me confessing to anything. It's nine o'clock; by ten o'clock dinner, he has to be with Norfolk and Audley, who he hopes will not scream and smell, like the beasts. There is a tentative, icy sun; loops of vapour coil across the river, a scribble of mist.
At Westminster, the duke chases out the servants. ‘If I want a drink I'll get it for myself. Go on, out, out you go. And shut the door! Any lurking at the keyhole, I'll skin you alive and salt you!’ He turns, swearing under his breath, and takes his chair with a grunt. ‘What if I begged him?’ he says. ‘What if I went down on my knees, said, Henry for the Lord's sake, take Thomas More out of the attainder?’
‘What if we all begged him,’ Audley says, ‘on our knees?’
‘Oh, and Cranmer too,’ he says. ‘We'll have him in. He's not to escape this delectable interlude.’
‘The king swears,’ Audley says, ‘that if the bill is opposed, he will come before Parliament himself, both houses if need be, and insist.’
‘He may have a fall,�
�� the duke says. ‘And in public. For God's sake, Cromwell, don't let him do it. He knew More was against him and he let him creep off to Chelsea to coddle his conscience. But it's my niece, I suppose, who wants him brought to book. She takes it personally. Women do.’
‘I think the king takes it personally.’
‘Which is weak,’ Norfolk says, ‘in my view. Why should he care how More judges him?’
Audley smiles uncertainly. ‘You call the king weak?’
‘Call the king weak?’ The duke lurches forward and squawks into Audley's face, as if he were a talking magpie. ‘What's this, Lord Chancellor, speaking up for yourself? You do usually wait till Cromwell speaks, and then it's chirrup-chirrup, yes-sir-no-sir, whatever you say, Tom Cromwell.’
The door opens and Call-Me-Risley appears, in part. ‘By God,’ says the duke, ‘if I had a crossbow, I'd shoot your very head off. I said nobody was to come in here.’
‘Will Roper is here. He has letters from his father-in-law. More wants to know what you will do for him, sir, as you have admitted that in law he has no case to answer.’
‘Tell Will we are just now rehearsing how to beg the king to take More's name out of the bill.’
The duke knocks back his drink, the one he has poured himself. He bounces his goblet back on the table. ‘Your cardinal used to say, Henry will give half his realm rather than be baulked, he will not be cheated of any part of his will.’
‘But I reason … do not you, Lord Chancellor …’
‘Oh, he does,’ the duke says. ‘Whatever you reason, Tom, he reasons. Squawk, squawk.’
Wriothesley looks startled. ‘Could I bring Will in?’
‘So we are united? On our knees to beg?’
‘I won't do it unless Cranmer will,’ the duke says. ‘Why should a layman wear out his joints?’
‘Shall we send for my lord Suffolk too?’ Audley suggests.