‘Everybody let her down. Her advisers were a set of old women. Fisher may have been a very holy man, but he was useless. As far as I can see, he told her to keep cheerful and hope for the best. And as for her friends abroad – what did your Emperor do? He made warlike noises.’
Chapuys says, ‘My master has the Turks to fight. He has more to do than quarrel with a wilful prince in a small island.’
‘So why should my king hold back now? He is at ease in his own kingdom. He can deal with his daughter as he pleases.’
‘You will forgive me for saying this,’ Chapuys says, ‘and I hope the dead will forgive me too – if the Emperor did not make shift to rescue his noble aunt, perhaps it was because he did not know what he would do with her thereafter. She would only have been a charge on him. She was used to spending money, as a queen does. And she might have lived to a great age.’
You must respect a man who cuts through the pieties as the ambassador does. He always tells people, don’t underestimate Chapuys. Behind his politesse there is a passionate little man, a cunning man too, and one prepared to take risks.
‘With Mary it is otherwise,’ the ambassador says. ‘Even if she does not achieve the throne, her children may, and they may turn the world in a way that is very much to the Emperor’s mind. You say Henry is at ease. But though the Emperor will overlook much, he will not suffer Mary to be mistreated. He will send ships.’
‘He will never make landfall.’
‘Have you studied a map of these islands? My prince is master of the seas. While you are guarding the coast of Kent, his ships will be bobbing in from Ireland. While you are watching the south-west, he will invade from the north-east.’
‘His captains will die on these shores. The king has said he will eat them.’
‘I am to carry that message?’
‘If you like. You know, and I know, the Emperor in arms has no power to save Mary. Her case is urgent.’
A head emerges, coming up the winding stair. It is Christophe. ‘Lords, will you have comfits?’ He clatters down a silver tray. ‘Master Call-Me is here.’ He casts an evil glance at Chapuys. ‘He is here for breaking ciphers. None may stand against his wit.’
Chapuys clasps his hands together. He fears for his papers, left below. His knee joints are sore, and a small groan escapes him, at the thought of lurching down three flights then climbing up again.
‘Ask Call-Me to sit beneath the vine and listen for the nightingales. Then fetch up the ambassador’s papers. Do not look into them.’
Christophe’s head sinks out of sight. ‘What a donkey that boy is!’ Chapuys selects a strawberry and frowns at it. ‘Thomas, I see it is not an easy thing to do, to show an innocent girl that the world is not as she thinks. The late Katherine never let the child hear a word in dispraise of her father. Everything was the fault of the cardinal, or his council, or his concubine. Nothing was the fault of Henry. Naturally she expected to be embraced, without question, once Anne Boleyn was dead.’ He takes a chary nibble. ‘Naturally, you must disabuse her.’
He nods. ‘She does not know her father.’
‘How could she? She has hardly seen him in five years. She has been in prison.’
‘Prison? She has been kept in great comfort.’
‘But we must not tell her that, Thomas. Better to tell her she has suffered grievously, in case she feels she has not done enough. She boasts to me she is not afraid of the axe.’
‘Is she not? When her last night on earth falls, and she must wait it out sleepless, and all that is before her is a sorry breakfast with the headsman, it will be no good crying for me to save her then.’
In the silence that ensues he wonders, where has Christophe got to? Is he reading the ambassador’s papers after all? What a breach of decorum that would be. But profitable, if the papers were in French. Christophe has sound recall.
‘It is her mother …’ Chapuys says. He is afraid, as shadows gather, at having spoken ill of the dead. ‘I believe she vowed to Katherine she would never give way. Vows to the living may be set aside, with their permission. But the dead do not negotiate.’
‘She does not want to live?’
‘Not at any price.’
‘Then how will history regard her – the grandchild of the kings of Spain, with not the wit or policy to save herself?’
Christophe whoops from below: the ambassador, who has selected an aniseed sweet, almost swallows it. The boy erupts among them, slaps down the Imperial folio: the black eagle flies against white marble. ‘What kept you, Christophe?’
‘One came up from Islington and says they fear thunder, the cows are lying down in the fields. I pray you, come down at the first spot of rain. If lightning strikes you are undone. Only a fool would stay at the top of a tower.’
‘I shall watch the sky,’ he says. ‘It will break over London first.’
Christophe’s head declines from view, a greasy planet in a crooked cap. He waits till he is sure the boy is out of earshot, then says, ‘If her father were to die now, then Mary might find herself queen, despite any disposition her father has made, despite any act of Parliament. Then as queen, she could put all to rights. Reunite us with Rome. Rivet on our shackles. She would have the pleasure of striking off my head. I do not trust her fair words.’
‘And what words are they?’
He takes out Mary’s letter and skims it across the table. ‘Shall I have Christophe fetch lights?’
‘I will puzzle it out,’ the ambassador says. ‘It is her hand,’ he allows. He squints at the paper. The arch behind him fills with the evening’s lustre, a pale opaline glow. ‘She is adamant she will resist the oath. But she calls you her friend – next to her father, God save her innocence, she calls you her chief friend in this world.’
‘But why should I trust her? I think she is full of guile.’
He is enjoying himself. The ambassador, he thinks, must woo me. I shall pretend I am a flighty heiress, and he must soothe my fears and caress me with his promises.
‘Mary has led me into a place of great peril,’ he says. ‘I have lost my reputation with the king. And what had I, but my reputation? Even if he does not kill me, nobody wants a used councillor.’
The ambassador knows the game but he will not play. Grimly he says, ‘Why does she think you are her friend? Something her mother told her. It can only be that. To think that after all this toil –’ He breaks off. He looks both angry and ashamed. ‘It seems to me that, if she trusts you, so must I. Which is an unfortunate situation to be in.’
‘You must advise her to give in, and you must make it right with the Emperor. Get his permission. His blessing.’
‘Unfortunately I do not keep the Emperor in my closet, where I can consult him at will.’
‘No? You should hang up his portrait. Perhaps in time you could teach it to speak.’
He thinks he hears a footstep below. ‘Hush.’ He is on his feet. He calls into the stairwell: ‘Who is that?’ The ambassador tenses and gathers himself, as if at any peril he would launch himself from the tower. The window is unglazed; the fading light softens the brickwork to a faint, flushed rose.
No answer. Prior Bolton did not build his garden walls high, or secure his fences. An ill-wisher can bend wattle or willow; through a fence of pliant hazel, a felon insinuate. He touches his heart and feels the knife, nestled between silk and linen.
‘Defence of a tower is easy,’ he says. ‘Even a garden tower. Anyone coming up, you just push them down again.’
‘You would relish that,’ Chapuys says. ‘They tell me you greatly enjoyed your tussle with the councillor Fitzguillaume. Really, Thomas, you are such a boy.’
‘Christophe?’ he calls. His voice curves in the stone spiral. ‘You are there?’
An answer echoes: ‘Where else?’ Christophe is surprised. He is always on guard, it is his early training as
a thief. In his unoccupied moments, he sinks on his heels, his back against the wall, his head dropped as if he were dozing; but his ears are open, his eyes scanning for movement at the edge of his vision.
‘No one is there,’ he reassures the ambassador. ‘It is only Christophe.’ Chapuys settles back in his chair. ‘Eat up the strawberries,’ he tells him. ‘Write to Rome.’
‘But should one trust this fruit? To eat it raw?’ Chapuys frowns. ‘Chez-moi, we bake it in tarts.’
‘The Pope will forgive her, if she submits to save her life. Tell her you have asked for absolution for her. If you’re worried about the cost, I’ll cover it with Rome myself.’
‘I am more worried about my digestion. And I doubt she will credit this specious reasoning.’
‘Go to her first thing tomorrow, I’ll write you a pass.’ He leans towards the ambassador. ‘Tell her this. While Anne Boleyn was alive, there was no chance that Henry would restore her to the succession. But now, if she obeys him in every particular, her fortunes may look up.’
‘You are making her this offer?’ Chapuys raises an eyebrow. ‘Will Henry not prefer his bastard boy? I thought you favoured Richmond yourself. What has happened?’
‘Richmond cannot be put in place without great quarrel and grudge. Whichever lady the king has been married to – if he was ever married to anybody – the whole world agrees it was not to Richmond’s mother. As for any new heir he may get – the life of a young child, you cannot count on it from hour to hour. Tell Mary: if ever she is to compromise her conscience, now is the time, when she can do herself some good.’ He leans back in his chair. ‘Yes, of course she will despise herself afterwards. But that is the price. Tell her time will ease the sting of it.’
‘It seems to me,’ the ambassador says, ‘you are saying, you can live, but only as Cromwell permits. You can reign even – but only through Cromwell’s grace.’
‘If you wish to explain it like that.’ He has lost patience. ‘Explain it how you like. I will send her a document to sign. A deed of submission. She need not read it. In fact, she must not, as she may need to repudiate it later. But she must have a clerk copy it, because it cannot go to the king in my hand.’
‘No, that would wreck everything,’ Chapuys smiles. ‘She is not simple, you know.’
‘Tell her that from now on I will make sure she is protected. She will live at her ease, as a king’s daughter, and no one will trouble her to make the same prayers as I do, or to give up her saints, or her ceremonies. But then tell her – if she does not give way now, she is lost. I will regard her as the most obdurate and ungrateful woman who ever lived. I will not block the king’s will. And even if by some miracle she survives, she is dead to me. I take my leave of her for ever. I shall never come into her presence. I will never see her or speak to her again.’
A pause. ‘I see.’ The ambassador looks sardonic. ‘You had better write that yourself. I will carry your letter faithfully.’
‘Shall we go down?’
Chapuys winces as he stands, and rubs his back. ‘You first, my lord. I am so slow.’
He scoops the papers from the marble. ‘I’ll carry these.’ He is ahead of the ambassador. At the first landing he calls up, ‘I am not looking into them, I promise!’
Christophe is squatting, vigilant, in the posture he had imagined. Standing by him, another shape in the dimness. ‘Good evening, sir,’ the shape says softly. It is Mr Wriothesley, a sheaf of peonies in his hand.
In the parlour with the lapis tiles, the flame of a single wax candle shimmering in the blue, he makes his first draft; it is hard for him, to become the king’s daughter. At dawn he takes the draft back to the city, and in the morning light sits before it again: humble, trembling, obedient. Perhaps he should do this in a room alone; but he does not want to think about it too much.
He picks up a quill. Examines its tip. ‘This will require self-abasement.’
Richard Cromwell says, ‘Shall I go out and find somebody who’s better at it than you are?’
‘Richard Riche knows the art of creeping,’ Gregory offers. ‘And Wriothesley can crawl when required.’
He begins: ‘Most humbly prostrate before your Majesty …’
‘Try, prostrate at the feet of your Majesty,’ Gregory says.
‘Redundant,’ Richard says.
‘Yes, but it makes her sound … flatter.’
He amends the phrase. ‘Don’t let our efforts be mentioned outside this room. The king must think she composed it herself. I write to … why do I write?’
… To open my heart to your grace … as I have and will put my soul under your direction … so I wholly commit my body … desiring no state, no condition, nor no manner or degree of living but such as your grace shall appoint …
‘It sounds straight out of a law book,’ Richard says. ‘Not this, not that, not the other.’
‘True. She is not a Gray’s Inn man.’ He is exasperated. He knows no way to draft, but to cover every circumstance; no way to write that leaves a gap, a hairsbreadth, a crack, that would allow meaning to slide or leak away. Forgive my offences … I do recognise, accept, take, repute and acknowledge …
‘The king must expect her to take a lawyer’s advice,’ Gregory says. ‘He will expect it to show.’
… repute and acknowledge the king’s highness to be supreme head, under Christ, of the church of England …
I do freely, frankly … recognise and acknowledge that the marriage formerly had between his majesty and my mother … was by God’s law and man’s law incestuous and unlawful …
‘Incestuous and unlawful,’ Gregory repeats. ‘It covers everything. Nothing is left to want.’
‘Except,’ Richard says, ‘that she has not actually taken the oath.’
He dries the ink. ‘As long as no one makes Henry face that fact.’
Let this be her own form of oath, crushing and comprehensive. When she writes of Katherine, she says, the late princess dowager, as any subject might; but she also writes my mother, my dead mother: whose hand now falls incapacitate, and flinches into its shroud. Catalina, today you are put down; the living beat the dead, England conquers Spain. I have written letters for Mary before, he thinks, more pitiful than this and more yielding: I am but a woman, and your child. They met with small success. They did not touch the king’s heart. What touches his heart is giving him everything he wants: and in such a form that, until he had it, he did not know what he lacked. I put my soul under your direction. I commit my body to your mercy.
‘I want Rafe to take this to Hunsdon,’ he says. ‘Get it signed tonight.’
We are now in the third week of June. A gusty wet spring when Anne died; a month passes, and we are in high summer. On a hot morning you close your eyes and on your lids is stamped a blazing pattern of cloth of gold. You raise your arm to cover your face and the glare shifts to purple, as if bishops were hatching through flames. With the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, he rides up to Hunsdon to honour the young lady who – penitent, chastened, abased – is once again fit to be called the king’s daughter.
Hertfordshire is a moneyed and populous country, well wooded and well furnished with the residences of gentlemen and courtiers. The house itself, brick-built on high ground, is fit for the accommodation of a king’s family. The manor itself is ancient, but this present house is perhaps eighty years old; they show as antiquities their charters with painted shields bearing the emblems of long-dead lords: the bend sable of a Despencer heiress, the Mowbrays’ lion argent, and the royal arms of Edmund Beaufort, with their broken border of silver and blue. Two years back the king laid out near three thousand on new tiles and timbers, and sent up people from Galyon Hone’s workshop to glaze the principal chambers with striped roses, lovers’ knots, shivering white falcons and fleur-de-lys. At the same time – providentially, as it turns out – the whole house was made more tight and secure, wi
th new hinges, clasps, hooks, bolts and locks.
On the journey the trains of the three lords keep separate, for fear of quarrels between servants. Norfolk says, cackling, ‘It is well-known what Cromwell does when he strays north of London, he will stop at some low hostelry to drag out a pot-washer and have his pleasure of her.’ Except that the duke uses a coarser expression, accompanying it with a driving elbow and a pumping fist.
Charles Brandon roars. It’s Brandon’s sort of joke.
He notices the Lesser Thomas is riding with Norfolk. Whatever the half-brothers were whispering about when he left them together, they are whispering still. ‘You see that?’ he says to Suffolk.
‘I do,’ Suffolk says. ‘Your man, Tom Truth. Walking/talking. Dipping/snipping. Wishing/fishing.’
Poor boy, he thinks. Even Suffolk knows how evil he rhymes. He recalls the young Howard’s stricken face, when he broke it to him that the ladies shared their verses. As if he never thought that could happen. As if he thought they read the poem then ate the paper.
In the great hall, Lady Shelton meets them; she has been Mary’s custodian these last three years, not a post anyone envies. Brandon strides in: she makes her reverence: ‘My lord Suffolk. And Thomas Cromwell, at last.’ She kisses him heartily, as if he were her cousin; whereas to Thomas Howard, who really is her cousin, she says, ‘May we hope your lordship will not abuse the furnishings? Inventory is kept, and the tapestry that was rent by your lordship, the other week, was worth a hundred pounds.’
‘Was it so?’ Norfolk says. ‘I wouldn’t use it to wipe my arse. Where’s John Shelton? Never mind, I’ll find him myself. Charles, come with me.’
The dukes exit, hallooing for their host. He says, ‘He attacked the arras? What else did he do?’
‘He threatened Lady Mary with a beating, and drove his fist into the wall, injuring himself.’ Lady Shelton raises a hand to hide her smile. ‘He was like a drunken bear. I thought Mary would faint from fright. I thought I would. Anyway, you are here now, thank God.’
The Mirror and the Light: 2020’s highly anticipated conclusion to the best selling, award winning Wolf Hall series (The Wolf Hall Trilogy, Book 3) Page 15