‘So Chapuys tells me.’ He eats a fig, meditatively. ‘I’d rather be in bed with a scorpion than with Honor Lisle.’
‘I too,’ Christophe says loyally, coming in with cheese. ‘I would squash her beneath my foot. Are you sitting up writing your king book tonight?’
Call-Me turns a curious glance on him. But he does not ask.
When the northern lords have made their excuses for their conduct during the winter past, the king sends them home wearing the badge of St George. He decrees the red cross a mark of allegiance for all men who have a coat to pin it on: wear a red ribbon, or sew a red thread that connects you to your sovereign. Because though the rebels are stood down, and the weapons confiscated, there is no truce in the war of words. The south calls the north traitorous; the north calls the south heretical. The north says, you have abused us for a thousand years: all we represent is a barrier between you and the Scots, a wall of corpses to delay them, while you have time to lock up your wives and daughters and put your gold in store.
The southerners say, have you ever been to Dover? Have you ever stood on the cliffs and seen the lights on the French coast, and considered how narrow is the Narrow Sea – how much we risk, and how much we pay, to save you from the slavers and pirates and barbarians who have been battering our shores since shores were thought of?
He says to the king, in the north they have contempt for the king’s peace, they want to administer their own murders. If Norfolk cannot subdue them they will fall into their old savagery, where each eye or limb or life itself is costed out, and all flesh has a price. In our forefathers’ time a nobleman’s life was worth six times that of a man who followed the plough. The rich man can slaughter as he pleases, if his pocket can bear the fines, but the poor man cannot afford one murder across his lifetime. We repudiate this, he tells the king: we say a man of violence cannot go free because his cousin is the judge, no more than a wealthy sinner can make up for his sins by founding a monastery. Before God and the law, all men are equal.
It takes a generation, he says, to reconcile heads and hearts. Englishmen of every shire are wedded to what their nurses told them. They do not like to think too hard, or disturb the plan of the world that exists inside their heads, and they will not accept change unless it puts them in better ease. But new times are coming. Gregory’s children – and, he adds quickly, your Majesty’s children yet to be born – will never have known their country in thrall to an old fraud in Rome. They will not put their faith in the teeth and bones of the dead, or in holy water, ashes and wax. When they can read the Bible for themselves, they will be closer to God than to their own skin. They will speak His language, and He theirs. They will see that a prince exists not to sit a horse in a plumed helmet, but – as your Majesty always says – to care for his subjects, body and soul. The scriptures enjoin obedience to earthly powers, and so we stick by our prince through thick and thin. We do not reject part of his polity. We take him as a whole, consider him God’s anointed, and suppose God is keeping an eye on him.
Until these blessed days dawn, ‘Let’s have peace,’ he says: ‘Peace is cheap.’ Everyone agrees the north must be governed better, but by whom? Thomas Cromwell thinks we need able men, but the Duke of Norfolk thinks we need noble men.
When fresh insurrection breaks out, it is led by a man who owes the Lord Privy Seal a great deal of money. His name is Francis Bigod: a boy in Wolsey’s household, an Oxford scholar, zealous for the gospel till lately; a man on friendly terms with our archbishop, with Hugh Latimer, with Robert Barnes; on friendliest terms of all with my lord Cromwell. So what does it mean, what can it mean, that such a man is riding about the countryside talking wild and waving a sword, swearing to take back Hull for the rebels, seize the town of Beverley, launch a force against the port of Scarborough? He is tired of people asking him, what does it mean, and whence comes this? Did you quarrel? As if he were responsible for Bigod’s bloody caprice.
He can only say, Bigod asked some strange things of me lately. He asked how the king could be responsible for our souls: as if there were some other candidate on earth, better qualified. He asked if he, Bigod, could preach in the pulpit, like a priest. When I said no, he asked, could he be ordained a priest? Though he was married?
He is brainsick, perhaps, his wits turned. But his folly will undo his countrymen, leading them to the fight through weather in which only a novice would campaign. And Bigod is not so mad he cannot be responsible for his actions. The king’s pardon was once and once only: after that, martial law.
Hans comes to him. ‘He has decided he wants a wall painting.’
‘Is that more difficult?’
Hans rubs his beard. He wants to talk terms; he wants to go on the royal books, with board and lodging and a workspace at Whitehall for the life of this project and beyond. He asks for a guarantee of thirty pounds a year, and then he will turn down other commissions and call himself painter to the King of England.
‘Thirty?’ He frowns. But after all, Hans has a mistress and two children to keep, apart from his family over the sea.
Hans says, ‘There is a piece of wall in the privy chamber here, I measure it at twenty-two feet.’
‘The privy chamber? That’s where he wants it?’
‘I should hardly put it there without his permission.’
‘I thought he would want it in the presence chamber. To awe the whole world.’
‘No. He just wants to awe you. And his attending gentlemen. And I suppose any poor foreigner he brings in for a tour.’
Of course, the privy chamber is not as private these days as its name implies. The king does not reckon to be alone there. If he wants solitude, or the company of one or two, he finds himself a sanctum in every house: a corner room where he tunes a lute, or a secret book store up a winding stair.
Hans says, ‘I do not mind if few people see it, as long as the right people see it. I plan to place his head’ – he indicates above his own head, ‘about here. No harm to give him an extra inch or so.’
‘In the leg,’ he suggests, ‘not the body. Or you mean elsewhere?’
Han sniggers. ‘I will draw him with gown well-parted, so the world can see the wonder. A generous wad of quilting.’
‘How big will it be? The painting, I mean.’
Hans stretches his arms then wheels about, demonstrating in space. ‘He wonders if he should have his father painted too.’
‘In the same picture?’
‘It can be done.’
And his mother, why not? A line of kings and queens, stretching into the blue distance. And an unborn child hovering, like a shadow of a bird against glass.
‘So he must be available to me,’ Hans says. ‘For drawings. They must be detailed, it will take time. Afterwards I can dispense with his body. He need not be present. I can meet separately with his clothes.’
‘You did not give me that choice when you painted me.’
‘But I failed with you,’ Hans says curtly. ‘You should have been painted by some other master, a dead one, for God He knows, you looked dead. You know Antonello, that fellow from Messina? He would have dragged some expression out of you.’
He has seen this master’s work. When Antonello painted the grandees of Venice, he captured the sceptical raised eyebrow, the flicker of a sour smile. But the Venetians didn’t like his work; he knew too much about them.
‘By the way,’ Hans says, ‘how is your daughter?’
‘Gone home.’ He intends to say no more.
‘She did not like England? Or she did not like you?’
Hans, he thinks, has likely known about Jenneke for years. It would explain certain snatches of conversation, broken off: sideways glances, sly. ‘Hans,’ he says, ‘don’t ask questions unless you know what to do with the answers.’
March, 1537: day by day, at the Tower and at the Rolls House, the Lord Privy Seal unpicks the events of th
e year past. With witnesses, with interrogatories before him, with clerks and Mr Wriothesley, he is laying bare, day by day and name by name, the machinery of revolt.
‘So you say you were coerced into rebellion? That you took an oath against your will? Please name the rebels who resorted to you, and say when. How were they armed? Did they use force against your person? Did they threaten force against your person? You say your horses were seized, your thatch fired, your wife insulted – you have witnesses? You allege the rebels set fire to your property, which included movable goods to the value of …? You did not have an inventory? Ah, I see, they burned your inventory. And what did you do, to counter their threats? Did you not send messages to your friends for help? You did, and they did not stir? Why not? What had you done to them, to cause them to abandon you?’
Mr Wriothesley wears the sables sent him as a present by our man in Brussels. Christophe builds up the fire. He, Lord Privy Seal, now keeps his own wine store here at the Tower. He has a strongroom, to lock up the interrogatories, so no one can interfere with them overnight, writing between the lines. Helpers come in and out – Augmentations men, his relative John ap Rice, and a useful cleric called Edmund Bonner, a fussy, clucking little man with an eye for the ladies and an ear for gossip. The bishops, still working on their new statement of doctrine, send him weighty folios every night: from the snivelling wrecks at the Tower, he goes home to number the sacraments. The interrogations grind on through the spring. For every answer he has six questions. He is willing to pinch a man with pains, if nothing else will work, though the threat will do more, and he regards it as a defeat if he has to call for chains and heated irons.
Wriothesley has not his patience: but then, he is young, and he has a family he would like to see sometimes. He will touch his elbow: ‘Sir, this is a mild pain, and we have a stubborn rebel before us, and it is late. I believe he can stand more.’
But he thinks, no, none of us can stand anything. Scrape our skin, and beneath it there is an infant, howling.
He says, ‘You could try listening. That’s how you find things out.’
‘But if he says nothing?’
‘Then listen to his silence.’ Listen through his silence. Imagine what you could give him, to make him speak – instead of what you could take away. Perhaps he must die, and he knows that; but some deaths can be faced and some not. What is it worth, to be spared castration, and the apprehension of it? You could offer him the shock of the axe, the carpet of blood, not the panic of half-hanging and the agony of the knife in the bowel. It is all about anticipation, he tells Call-Me. Give him something to live for, or offer him a death that spares him shame. Assure him that, whether or not he helps us, the king will pay his debts and look after his family: such small mercies can make a felon weep and break his will.
In no other country could this happen. In the domains of François or Charles there would be no truces, negotiations, or sessions of question and answer that stretch from Advent to Trinity. Once apprehended the noble suspects would be tortured and killed and the common dead would be butchered and lie under the open sky. He says, where we cannot avoid severity, we can still temper justice with mercy. Where loyal men have been despoiled of property, the crown will compensate them. Where the king has been well-served, there must be rewards. Where his authority has been held in contempt, retribution must be swift and public. In the north Norfolk hangs truce-breakers from the trees. He hangs them in chains if he can get them, but iron is so dear, and rope will do. Their wives come by night to cut them down, but the king says any women who are caught must be straitly punished. He wishes the corpses to hang there through Easter and into the warm weather: as you hang a maggoty crow on a fence, as an example to other birds not to steal your crops. In London, heads are spiked on the bridge, and limbs of traitors are nailed to the gates. But the cold weather stops them rotting and the citizens are sickened by the sight.
By the middle of February young Bigod is captured. His captains are in ward. Tyburn waits for them, in season: no rush. The summer will clean up the winter’s spoilage. Thomas Cromwell will never recover the money he is owed. Nor will Henry learn he should bury the dead.
He sends for Thomas Wyatt to see him at the Rolls House. Like every loyal gentleman he has been in the saddle against the rebels, but there is another task for him. He has long begged to be sent out of the kingdom. Now he is going as ambassador to the Emperor. It means pursuing Charles across Europe summer and winter: an ideal posting for a restless man. The role needs honest force and honeyed words, and a certain willingness to obfuscate about the intentions of the King of England: and as Wyatt says that to him nothing is ever clear, and no truth is a single truth, he seems the man for the job.
The Emperor continues to urge that Lady Mary should marry the brother of the Portuguese king. He recommends Dom Luis as wise, discreet and loving. He will be content to reside in England, rather than carry the princess from her native land.
‘Wyatt,’ he says, ‘ask the Emperor how much he will pay us for Mary. Put it suavely – but do not be misled if he names great sums, ask him how he will secure the debt. The king will not part with her for promises.’
‘You don’t want this match,’ Wyatt says.
‘More to the point, she doesn’t.’
‘What do you want?’
‘Only to protect her.’
‘The king needs a friend in Europe,’ Wyatt says. ‘The kind of special friend he can only get through a marriage.’
‘The king could get a troop of friends in Switzerland, and among the German princes. All we need is to agree a bare statement of doctrine, and we will have allies enough.’ He frowns. ‘And if a marriage must be made, better Eliza than Mary.’
‘You are a long thinker, my lord. The young lady is, what, four this year?’
‘So it cannot be consummated,’ he says. ‘Not for ten years – and that would be early. Twelve years, if we plead she is delicate. It will not be a true marriage, so if it turns out not to serve us we can set it aside.’
‘You guard Mary’s virginity,’ Wyatt says.
He shrugs.
‘You were her Valentine. Wriothesley is telling everyone how he carried a handsome present to her.’
At the court’s annual feast – Wyatt well knows – we draw lots for our Valentine. So no one is left out, young or old.
‘One never knows with Cremuello,’ Wyatt says. ‘I remember when the rumour was that you were making your addresses to one Mistress Seymour, who is now queen.’
Cold as a stone he says, ‘What gave rise to that idea?’
‘She would have been better off,’ Wyatt says.
‘The queen is not unhappy.’
‘You would know, my lord. You know much about women that is hidden from the rest of us. How to advance them. How to undo them.’
Last summer, then, abrades Wyatt’s temper, frays his inner peace. Though he has slipped the noose, he must be unpicking the rope, shredding the fibres in his fingers. ‘Wyatt,’ he says, ‘such talk will undo me. Is that your intention?’
‘Put yourself in my place. In every conversation we have held for a twelvemonth, I have had to ask myself, is he trying to save me, or is he trying to drown me? Am I precious cargo, or thrown overboard?’
‘Well, proof of the pudding,’ he says. (Let the poet do what he can with that image.) ‘You are still breathing.’
‘And yours till my last breath.’ Wyatt stands up and stretches. ‘I would follow you to the ends of Christendom. Whither go I now, chasing Carolus.’
Wyatt seeks himself in the mirror. In some invisible adjustment, his finger brushes the feather in his cap. ‘Look after Bess Darrell while I’m gone.’
He takes a day off, and walks the grounds of Austin Friars with his gardeners, Mercy Prior leaning on his arm. The wood of the garden arbour is sodden to the touch and the walls have grown plump pillows of moss. The s
takes that support his young trees seem to be quivering with their own, green inner life.
He invites Richard Riche to supper, to ask what can be done for the other Bess – Lady Oughtred. ‘Her husband left her mean provision. She wants a house of her own.’
‘The Seymour family has deserved well of the king,’ Call-Me says. ‘Riche, you might help her to some abbey?’
Riche says, ‘You will find she is positioning herself for a new marriage. I am surprised, sir, your friends among the ladies have not mentioned it. She will look high, and quite proper she should. The Earl of Oxford is mentioned.’
John de Vere is an old widower: two wives killed under him already. He is the fifteenth earl. Imagine, he thinks, being the fifteenth anything.
Thurston has tried a new cod dish – garlic, saffron, fennel. Just white and yellow, as he said: it looks as if they’ve sicked it up. ‘I hear you will have Quarr Abbey,’ he says to Call-Me. ‘Good rents for you from the manors. And the woods are worth a clear hundred pounds, are they not?’
Ten monks at Quarr, all of whom desire continuance in their vows. Some thirty-eight persons waiting on them. White stone, sea views, fifty-five pounds of debt: not a large house, but there are lands in Devon that, obligations discharged, should come to Call-Me within six months. ‘I am thinking about Launde for myself,’ he says.
Riche says, ‘Launde will not come down yet. It is worth four hundred a year.’
‘I can wait.’
He watches the platter of fish go out. He is struck by a happy thought, and it has nothing to do with abbeys at all.
He seeks an audience with the queen. ‘When is your sister Bess coming to court? You will need her company through these next months.’
‘I suppose so,’ Jane says. She counts on her fingers. ‘It seems a long time to October.’
There is a rustle that spreads from where she sits, through the room, through the court, through England and across the sea. At last, the news is public.
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 50