‘Smaller rooms, madam. You would not want those.’
She made a wry face. Cranmer had once said, she is afraid of what she has begun. ‘Perhaps I shall give it all up,’ she said. She pulled at the fur of her cuff, tugging gently as if to show what she would lose. ‘Perhaps the king can never marry me, and I am a fool to think he can. Perhaps I shall give it all up, Cremuel, and come and live in your warm house with you.’
The town of Beverley is the first place north of the Humber to join the rebel cause. Thomas Percy, who is the Earl of Northumberland’s brother, brings five thousand rebels down from the north-east. A one-eyed lawyer called Aske is leading the commons of Yorkshire. First he said he was loath to do it, he said he was pressed – but that is what such chancers say. It is Aske who calls the rebellion a pilgrimage to the king: sometimes he calls it a pilgrimage for grace. He gives the rebels their emblem, raising over their ranks a banner of the Five Wounds. This is how Christ died: two nails in the hands and two in the feet, heart pierced by a lance.
The web of treason is sticky in the palm, and leaves its bloody smear: the pukers on the Louth cobbles, the fat confederates in the north, the abbots wiping their grease on their napkins and raising a glass of gore: the Scots, the French, Chapuys mon cher, Gardiner plotting in Paris, Pole at his dusty prie-dieu. When this is done, who will be master and who will be man? He pictures Norfolk in his armoury, polishing the plate: diligent he rubs, till he can see his swimming face. The king’s companions are prepared to march. So scented, the courtiers, so urbane: the rustle of silk, the soundless tread of padded shoes. But slaughter is their trade. Like butchers in the shambles, it is what they were reared for. Peace, to them, is just the interval between wars. Now the stuff for masques, for interludes, is swept away. It is no more time to dance. The perfumed paw picks up the sword. The lute falls silent. The drum begins to beat.
By mid-October, the king’s hand falls on Lincolnshire. Richard Cromwell writes to him from Stamford, where Charles Brandon has arrived with his power, and Francis Bryan with three hundred horse. The commons sue for pardon, and will hand over their ringleaders. Captain Cobbler is stripped of his borrowed coat. But can we send Charles north, to meet the next onslaught? Not unless we want trouble to break out again behind him.
Meanwhile, the storm-lashed King of Scotland has made landfall among the French. He has been seen at twilight in a lodging near Dieppe, his gentlemen about him, his manners so easy and free that no one knows who is gentleman and who is king: ‘I do not think,’ Henry says, ‘that anyone could entertain a similar doubt in my case, and even if I were to dissemble’ – he laughs – ‘I doubt I would pass as a common fellow, unless I were to assume some disguise, and even then …’ Scotland’s ships lie at anchor in the bay, while James himself takes the Paris road, with the intention of marrying a French princess and thereby doing mischief to his English neighbour.
It is a pity James did not linger in Dieppe. It might have killed him. The townsfolk complain of a pest brought over from Rye. Contagion and false news cannot be stayed by officers of the excise.
Wriothesley says, ‘Bishop Gardiner applies for instructions: how shall he bear himself if, as our ambassador, he should meet the King of Scots?’
He says, ‘He should congratulate James on escaping the dangers of the deep. He has been on his voyage a good while.’
The king says, ‘Tell Gardiner to do James no more honour than he must. I am, as all know, the rightful ruler of Scotland.’
Behind the king’s back he makes a sign to Call-Me: you can leave that out of your letter.
‘And if the French ask about the commotion in our shires,’ the king says, ‘let Gardiner assure them that I have an army at my command that is ready to humble any prince in Europe, and then have puissance remaining, for a second battle and a third.’
He can imagine with what shrugging, grimacing and eye-rolling this news will be received by François. ‘Though the Tudor claims he has a hundred thousand men, all know he has but a fraction of that, and cannot trust his own commanders: or if he can trust some of them, he does not know which.’
And when you think about it, François will say, what did it take, fifty years back, to invade England and overthrow Crookback? A rabble of two thousand mercenaries, led by a man whose name no one knew.
Henry says, ‘You can tell Gardiner, and any other person who enquires, that I will go against the rebels with the whole armed might of England, and so reduce them that their heirs will have to creep over the earth where they lie, and puzzle out their fragments with a magnifying glass.’
But meanwhile, what will he do? He will negotiate.
At Windsor, the king picks through his Italian songbook. The autumn rain beats at the glass. Dead leaves whisk through the air. A la guerra, a la guerra, Ch’amor non vol più pace …
The king says, ‘Where is Thomas Wyatt?’
‘In Kent, sir. Raising his tenants.’
‘How many can he fetch?’
‘A hundred and fifty. Perhaps two hundred.’
A la guerra … Love wants no more peace.
‘How is Sir Henry Wyatt?’
‘Dying, sir.’
‘Will he leave me anything?’
‘His son, sir. Begging as his last request that you will favour him.’
Tom Wyatt: his ardour, his faith, his verse.
The king says, ‘Will Lord Montague bring his people to the muster?’
‘He needs only a day’s warning, sir.’ He thinks, it will be interesting to see if he takes the field himself.
‘Where is his brother Reginald?’
‘Just left Venice.’
‘For?’ The king finishes his thought. ‘Perhaps for Rome. In Rome they will be triumphing over me now.
‘Questa guerra è mortale,’ the king sings. ‘Cromwell, I have forgot the words.
‘Io non trovo arma forte
Che vetar possa morte …’
What weapon is strong enough, to shield me from death? He leafs through the manuscript, which is illuminated with larkspur, vine leaves and leaping hares. ‘I am the tree the wind casts down, because it has no roots …’ And Scaramella goes to war, boot and buckler, lance and shield.
Five wounds. Wife. Children. Master. Dorothea with her needle, straight between his ribs. One withheld? A man might survive them if they were evenly spaced, and he knew the direction from which they would come.
The king says, ‘How many can Edward Seymour turn out?’
‘Two hundred, sir.’
‘And the Courtenays? My lord Exeter?’
‘Five hundred, sir.’
‘Richard Riche?’
‘Forty.’
‘Forty,’ the king says. ‘He is only a lawyer, of course.’
‘I have ordered every coastal district to keep a strait watch for alien ships.’
The king plucks his lute string. ‘Perché un viver duro e grave, Grave e dur morir conviene …’ My life hard, my death bitter, a ship that is wrecked upon a rock.
Prophets – and we are awash with them, though their better forecasts are made after the event – have assured us that this year the waters of Albion will run with blood. When he closes his eyes he can see the flow: not a river tumbling and bursting its banks, not a torrent roaring over stones, but a channel that is oily, crimson, a narrow slick rivulet, boiling beneath its surface: a slow, seeping, unstoppable flood.
In Yorkshire they sing that old complaint from John Ball’s day:
Now pride reigns in every place, and greed not shy to show its face,
And lechery with never shame, and gluttony with never blame.
Envy reigns with reason, and sloth is ever in season.
God help us for now is the time.
III
Vile Blood
London, Autumn–Winter 1536
Aske: he is a
petty gentleman, but the king places him at once – second cousin to Harry Percy, and kin to the Cliffords of Skipton Castle. Mr Wriothesley, newly attuned to the king’s mind, marvels at Henry’s knowledge of obscure family ties. In calling the process of the rebels a pilgrimage, Aske lends it the colour of piety. The aim of the Pilgrims, at divers times stated, is to have vile blood drained from the king’s council, and the nobility of England set up again; to have Christ’s laws kept, and restitution for injuries (as they call them) done to the church. Aske enforces an oath on those who come in his path.
He knows Robert Aske – to nod to, anyway. He is a member of Gray’s Inn, sometimes in London on business for the Percy family. Being a lawyer, Aske cannot claim ignorance. He is aware it is a gross presumption to offer oaths in the name of the king. And he must foresee – for he must be acquainted with the chronicles – what the end will be: how rank the puddle in which he swims and will one day sink.
We have all grown up on tales of Jack Straw and John Amend-All – those brave days when the commons marched on London and killed the judges and foreigners. They pissed in rich men’s beds, tore up their poetry books, and used altar cloths to wipe their arses. Their leaders were mean clerks and spoiled priests, Straw and Miller and Carter and Tyler, none of whom went by their right names; as for Amend-All, he is immortal, a self-made man green as spring, who noses up from his common grave whenever mutiny stirs. These rebels wrecked palaces and stormed the Tower of London itself. They smashed whatever they could find to smash – there were not so many mirrors in those days. On Cheapside they set a chopping block, and demanded the heads of fifteen of the king’s councillors, including the Lord Privy Seal. If they could not catch the men they were hunting, they hung up their coats instead and shot them with arrows.
In those days the King of England was a child. There was no good governance. Labourers and craftsmen were oppressed by statute, every trade on a set wage, whatever the price of grain. They endured the poll tax – no wonder that they set the heads of its begetters on spikes. Yet all the while, like Robert Aske, they called themselves loyal subjects, and shouted, ‘God bless our king.’
It is a hundred and fifty years since that broil. It is eighty years or more since Jack Cade called himself Captain of Kent and led his rabble to London Bridge. But to the rustici, you might as well say it happened last Easter, or before the Conquest. They say they want no taxes and will pay none, and they protest against imposts never levied and never imagined. And as the king says to him – when did you hear of a tax so light and pleasant that every man clamoured to pay it?
The common folk of England live on songs and tales and alehouse jokes. Spending their pence on candles to burn before holy images, they live in the dark, and in the dark take fright. Let us say a calf is born dead. By the time the tale crosses a field, it is a calf with two heads. Cross a stream, and it is a calf with two heads, chanting backwards in Latin, and some friar is charging a shilling for a charm against it. So it goes, in half a day, from abortion to Antichrist: and somehow, everybody is poorer except the priests. Pastors warn their flock that if they do not send tribute to Rome, trees will walk and crops will blight. They make them dread the fire of Purgatory, which eats to the bone; they ask, can you bear to see your dead folk burning – your helpless old mother, your dead little children, bound in agony and screaming for your prayers?
Now it is hard for them to hear the gospel news: there is no Purgatory, only Judgement. God is not a market trader, selling mercy by the pound. You cannot buy salvation, nor can you delegate a monk to work out your salvation for you.
‘In Lincolnshire,’ Mr Wriothesley says, ‘they believed the Pope was coming to their aid, in his own person.’
The king snorts. ‘They may as well say, a giraffe is coming. They do not know what a pope is.’
Perhaps they do not know what a king is either. Their leaders tell them that Henry has made himself God. Now if a child falls sick between Truro and Newcastle, they lay it at the king’s door; if a well dries, if the butter spoils, if a bucket leaks: everything that is out of joint with them, from a fall of hailstones to a cricked neck, they blame on the court and council. Their grievances run like streams underground, welling up from the Scots border to Dover, till the whole land is flooded with nonsense. How is it some verse against Cromwell, sung in the street in Falmouth, is chanted next day in Chester? The further he travels from London, the stranger Cromwell gets. In Essex he is a scheming swindler, a blasphemer and renegade Jew. Spread him east to Lincoln and he is notorious for his knowledge of poisons. In the dales of Yorkshire he is a magus, with the stars and moon on his coat, while in Carlisle he is a ghoul who steals children and eats their hearts.
He, Lord Cromwell, goes to London, to keep his hand on the city. The rebels have no cannon, but London’s walls are ornamental these days, you could knock them down with a dirty look. The Pilgrims boast they will strip the city bare and carry the glitter back to their caves. London dreads the north. Old people recall how Richard the usurper brought his outlanders down, bare-legged and wild-eyed, their speech uncouth, their actions worse: they burned ledgers for fuel, and would kill a man’s geese in his own backyard.
At the Rolls House and Austin Friars, he receives the city worthies, to soothe them and spur them on. At the Tower he ships out the king’s armaments and melts plate into coin. Then he hurries back to Windsor to parse true and false news and head the king’s council; whoever is notionally in charge, he writes the agenda. All information that comes in, if it is fresh, is wrong: if it is stale, it is possibly accurate, but also useless. Every order that goes out from the king contains its countermand: if this has occurred, do that, but if you are delayed or deceived, by no means do the other, but write and ask us. Be cautious but don’t delay. Strike boldly, but not too expensively. Use your judgement, but refer all to the king. The commanders in Lincoln, in Ampthill, in Yorkshire are trying to will themselves inside the heads of the councillors in Windsor, while the councillors strain to see far-off rills and bogs, dells and crags, cattle droves and goat tracks: terrain they have never visited, even in dreams.
Luckily, Lord Cromwell has been everywhere. He knows the eastern ports, the castles on the high fells. For the cardinal he used to ride to Durham. He could go north himself, get more certain news, and escort some of the king’s treasure to pay the troops. ‘But suppose they seized your person?’ Mr Wriothesley says. ‘Suppose they asked a ransom?’
‘How much do you think Henry would pay? He should set my value against what I bring in to the treasury.’
Richard Riche frowns. ‘And he should estimate, my lord, what you might bring in years to come, should God spare you.’
Call-Me suppresses a smile. Riche says, ‘Why the sneer, Wriothesley?’
‘It is not for any rebel to know Lord Cromwell’s worth.’
Riche turns on him. ‘You are not named in their songs, are you? Obscurity has its merits.’
Gregory says encouragingly, ‘They will hate you once they know you, Call-Me.’
He says, ‘I am sure you have deserved ill of them. They cannot find a rhyme for you, that’s all. They are worse poets than Tom Truth.’
An army must be supplied. With the king’s forces go the harness-makers and blacksmiths, the armourers, purveyors of soup kettles, bowstrings, blankets, buckets, trivets, rivets: and unless they are to go unpaid you need clerks to keep accounts, and the clerks need ink-horns and parchment and wax for seals. Each man in the field needs ale or beer, bacon and beef, salt fish and cheese, biscuits baked and not too old, peas or beans to boil in salt liquor, and a pot to boil them in. To get these things you need ready cash in a strongbox. When you are at war a promise will not do.
And as for the greater business of the realm – it does not stop because some arsewipes in the shires are waving pitchforks. Marriages are made and children born, and children grow and need new gowns, new household goods and minders. It is
time Anne Boleyn’s child began learning her letters. The Lady Mary longs for an infant of her own to love and in default she tries to love her half-sister; the child cannot be blamed, she says, for what her mother was. As her features emerge from baby flesh, Eliza is beginning to resemble less a piglet and more the king, so these days no one suggests she is Norris’s by-blow. No child should be left floating queasily, in the space between fathers. She is still a bastard, of course. But even a bastard daughter has value on the marriage market, if the King of England acknowledges her: so her education should be that of a princess.
He has arranged a stipend for a young woman, Cat Champernowne, whom he knows to be kind and a good Latinist. He trusts Eliza will live to thank him. It is important a child’s first tutor should be gentle and like a mother, so the child is not afraid of making mistakes. Look at Gregory, who now promises so well. His first tutor was Margaret Vernon, who was prioress at Little Marlow – a small house which closed this summer. Margaret has visited him in London, to exclaim over her pupil, his height, his looks, his manners. ‘Where have the years gone? It seems only yesterday since he was learning his Pater Noster.’
No one should think he hates nuns, or monks either. Many of them have been his friends. He used to ride up to Little Marlow, making business in the neighbourhood. His mother-in-law Mercy said, ‘What does she look like, this Margaret Vernon?’
He understood the question. ‘She’s not young.’
Gregory prospered with her. Now she must prosper in her turn. He makes a note: Margaret Vernon to Malling, Kent. Malling is a solid house, she will be well enough there: for as long as Malling lasts.
He thinks of Dorothea. He draws a monster in the margin of his papers. He thinks about Dr Agostino and his potions. If there is a mystery about the cardinal’s death, he is no nearer to solving it. The solution, he must suppose, lies in the heart of the king.
When he goes to the queen’s private apartments with Rafe and Call-Me, he finds her seated as usual among her women. Today everybody is sewing and no one singing; the queen’s neckline is edged with goldsmiths’ work, from which depend single fat pearls in the shape of tears. ‘Highness,’ he says, ‘why not ask the king to fetch Lady Mary here?’
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 36