‘Then do one thing for me,’ Wyatt says. ‘Call home that runt Edmund Bonner. He has trotted after me from Spain into France and I swear the next time we take ship I will overboard him.’
The fat little priest is newly popular with the king. ‘We sent Bonner to help you against the theologians. We thought he would strengthen your embassy. We meant well, I swear it.’
‘I would rather live in a rats’ nest than lodge with him. I have never met a man so quick to take offence, and so quick to give it. He makes me sweat with shame. I do not understand why either you or the king would promote such a ball of tallow.’
He is silent on that. ‘You would not like to go to France instead? To replace Gardiner? I mean to put some friend as ambassador in his place.’
Wyatt smiles, as if puzzled. ‘I am that friend?’
There is a tap at the door. It is Dick Purser. He pulls off his cap. ‘Master, the present from Danzig is here.’
He slaps his hands on the desk. ‘Alive?’
‘Three alive. Let us hope not all of them after one kind. None of us are minded to pick them up and see if they have pintles.’
‘I’m coming,’ he says. And to Wyatt, ‘We are done?’
‘If you knew the long empty days when I talk to you in my head …’
‘Then stay to supper.’
‘And the long empty nights,’ Wyatt says.
The presents from Danzig are sad huddles of fur, their eyes bright hostile points; they shiver as if they have a fever. ‘Get them in the pond,’ he says, dismayed.
Wyatt peers down at them. ‘What are they? Beaver?’
‘Not seen since our grandfathers’ time. I want to breed them. Fishermen will be against it.’
He shrugs. It’s always the wrong bits of the past people want back. With their dams, these busy animals can divert and slow the waters of streams likely to flood. No human ingenuity can match theirs, and it is a pity they were ever hunted. Wyatt says, ‘What else will you bring back? Wolves?’
We do not need more predators. We do not need wild boar, though they make good sport. But we need to keep our rivers in their courses, and we need to plant trees, if we are going to cut them down at the present rate: for timber frames for merchants’ houses, for palaces for princes; for ships to sail against the Pope and the Emperor, and all the world in league against us.
In the long twilight Wyatt says to him: ‘I have learned one thing in Spain. They have a poison so virulent that one drop on an arrowhead can kill. I wonder if I should get some for our purpose.’
‘Oh, I would sooner an honest murder,’ he says. He pictures Pole felled on the highway, his minions fleeing like piglets from the butcher. ‘I think of cleaving his cardinal’s hat in twain. Slicing his pate, as Becket’s was sliced.’
Outside the window rises an English moon, yellow as a slice of Banbury cheese. Wyatt says, ‘I must get down to Allington and see about my affairs. I do not have your skill in choosing deputies to guard my interests. My son is fifteen now, and if the worst befell, what have I to leave him?’
‘On paper you are rich.’
‘Oh, paper,’ Wyatt says. ‘I think it was not by a serpent, but by paper and ink that evil came into the world. Such lies are written of me, in and out of cipher, that I think, this time Thomas Cromwell will show me the door. But you do not.’
He does not answer. Wyatt says abruptly, ‘I want to see Bess Darrell.’
‘If the Courtenays were to be at their house in Horsley, the king’s business might take you that way. She has wit enough to meet you day or night.’
Wyatt has never mentioned the phantom child who saved his life. But its absence hovers, a mild haze, behind Wyatt’s shoulder where his guardian angel skulks.
He stands up. ‘I shall not see you again before you sail. I wish you a swift passage. I hold you in my prayers.’
They walk out together into a warm misty evening. At the gate Anthony is sitting with the porters. He is a melancholy sight, his hollow chest, his bowed head, his spindly legs stuck out in front of him.
‘Anthony, I thought you were in Stepney.’ To Wyatt he says, unnecessarily, ‘This is my fool.’
Anthony is wearing his working suit of stripes and patches. Wyatt passes him with a glance, and as the fool raises an arm in salutation, his silver bells chime.
Wyatt leaves to resume his embassy just after the feast of Corpus Christi. On 21 June he writes from the dockside at Hythe. No ship can leave, the winds are so stiff. All day it has been blowing, and it means to blow all night, but tomorrow, the mariners say, it will have blown itself out. Early, he hopes to set sail.
He, Lord Cromwell, thinks back to their parting: Wyatt’s eyes begged him to say, you need not go back to Spain, I will plead you have done your utmost. But Henry would answer, ‘I will be the judge of that.’ The king knows Wyatt’s uses. He is able to read sighs, construe by contraries. His word is just what a diplomat’s word should be: as clear as glass and as unstable as water.
Wyatt thinks himself shrewd, but he does not grasp what friendship is, as the world goes now. Friendship swears it will stand and never alter, but when the weather changes men change their coat. Not every man has a price in money: some will betray you for a kind word from a great man, others will forswear your company because they see you limp, or lose your footing, or hesitate once in a while. He says to Rafe and to Call-Me, I urge you both, undertake no course without deep thought: but learn to think very fast.
The Emperor and François, in the absence of the English envoy, have made what they call a Ten-Year Truce. It is well into July before he, Cromwell, can obtain a copy of the terms. Then he and all the councillors see how little England has been regarded. Wyatt writes to him, ‘The king has been left out of the cart’s arse.’ That makes him laugh, the thought of Henry sacked and tied for market, forgotten in a farmyard and forlorn in the rain.
Our official reaction to the treaty is disbelief. Instead of the Ten-Year Truce we call it the Ten-Minute Truce. Henry says, ‘Why does Charles think the King of France will keep faith with him, when he does not keep faith with me? He has broken every ancient agreement between his realm and ours. The King of France and the King of England have always delivered up each other’s rebels. So why has he not delivered up Pole?’
He, Lord Cromwell, sighs. ‘Gardiner has ill-served us in that regard. It is high time he came home.’
‘When he does, send him to his diocese,’ the king says. ‘We do not want him near our person.’
All my envoys have let me down, Henry complains. They know how peace threatens our interests, and yet they could not stop it. ‘Francis Bryan said he would trap Pole. But he has disappointed me. Like you, Cromwell.’
If the treaty lasts our peril is extreme. Charles has always seen himself as conqueror of Constantinople. But quicker would be conquest of England, and with France as his ally it would be simple enough and cheap. Only consider the friends he has waiting for him, as soon as he sets foot on our soil: the old Plantagenet families, with their retainers armed and ready. Pole’s people, the Courtenays.
Wyatt has been deceived by the Emperor. England has been deceived by both Emperor and France. Henry is furious. Nothing will console him but theology.
A delegation comes from the German princes, with high hopes of friendship, of compromises that will allow our churches to make common cause against the devil and the Pope. The king’s team of negotiators includes Robert Barnes, who is familiar with the Germans and with whom they make good cheer. But also it includes the Bishop of Durham, Cuthbert Tunstall, fetched down from his see in the north to strengthen the hand of those who say, ‘Slowly, slowly, sometimes no change is best.’
Tunstall is a subtle man, experienced, congenial. It is dismaying how the king favours him, conferring with him as he rides from house to house; he does not let the godly Germans get in the way of his hunting. Dr Bu
tts says, I suppose we should allow the king to ride, while he is able. But at every house where he intends a stay, Butts situates a surgeon.
The Lutherans tell Henry, your Majesty well knows we have made a League; it is not to attack anyone, only to secure us against the Emperor. If you will take part, you can be our head, we will make you Protector of our confederacy.
Through the summer the teams are locked in conference. Rafe Sadler takes minutes and relays them to the king. He himself, Thomas Cromwell, keeps a distance from their unsuccess. He knows the king will never agree that clergy may marry, or that laymen should receive Christ as both bread and wine. We cannot agree on the nature of Christ’s body, what is fact and what is allegory, what is human and what is divine. Can God be baked into bread? When we consume the host, why do we not hear the cracking of his bones? Is he still God, when he churns in our guts? And what if a dog eats him, is he still God then?
Corpus Christi is a miracle. It is a mystery. Once consecrated, the host contains your God, alive: the wine is his blood. You cannot hope to understand it but you must believe it. And if you fail to believe it you must keep quiet, because your failure can kill you.
The Germans do not enjoy their summer. They complain there are rats pounding across the floor of their lodgings, and where they sleep is next to the kitchen, so they are afraid their clothes smell of smoke and burnt fat. He could lodge them himself, but he would not go so far. He would not go far at all with Brother Martin. He is sending young men to study in Zürich, his mind drawn by the teaching of the learned doctors there. Hugh Latimer says the God of England worketh all, and under Him worketh Cromwell. But he keeps his eye on the prize: the English Bible. With this good book in your hands, God speaks to you as your father and mother spoke, as your nurse: and if you cannot read, others will read it for you, in this close, this loving, this familiar tongue.
The king has given permission for the Bible – what remains is to create and distribute it. He needs one to each parish, placed where the people have access. He needs copies by the thousand, not by the dozen. His friend the scholar Miles Coverdale takes charge of a revision, aiming to print in Paris. The French printers are the quickest in Europe. But the Inquisition operates there too.
Formerly he would have printed in Antwerp. But Charles is the master of those territories and Charles is in his killing vein. You sit down with his ambassadors, with Mendoza, with Chapuys; you pass a pleasant evening, you talk about books, you enjoy good food and a little music. But never forget: their regime buries women alive.
When the German doctors go home in September, it is with the king’s praise for their piety and learning. They should come back, Henry says; the door is open. That month he, the Vicegerent, makes new ordinances for the church. An end to pilgrimages. An end to the Angelus bell, which causes the people to kneel in the fields. No lights burning before statues or pictures. The images themselves remain, except the idols that the people furnish with oatcakes and ale; and the spangled, red-lipped Virgins who wear silver shoes when poor women go barefoot.
In autumn, too, he brings in a way of counting people. Each parish must start a register to record baptisms, marriages and burials. From now on his countrymen will know who they are and where they come from, who their cousins are and what their grandfather was called. Uncle Norfolk and his peers have heralds to tell them their lineage. The Poles, the Courtenays, the Veres and the Talbots, they have arms and devices. Their ancestors are buried beneath their own effigies, and even before noblemen learned to write, they had tame priests to record their lives. But the butcher or ploughman, the shepherd or shoemaker’s apprentice – for all he knows, he might have grown in a wood like a toadstool.
His friends ask: ‘What do you hear from Antwerp, from your lady daughter?’
He turns the conversation. He does not want to talk about Jenneke. He thinks, I may not be much of a father but she knows where to find me. If she sends a message it will reach me. Vaughan’s people will send it on the shortest route. But the Cromwell name is no protection to her, rather the reverse, and her faith – if she believes we are living through the last days – is a danger to him and to all her kin.
In high summer, he follows the king on his progress through Kent. At Dover they meet Lord Lisle, come over to importune the king about abbeys. ‘Talk to Riche,’ the king says, bored.
‘Riche?’ Lord Lisle says. ‘There never was such a dip-pocket as he! He wants a shilling to say good morning to you!’
‘He’s a lawyer,’ the king says, ‘how else do they make their shillings?’
The king is at his ease with Lisle, who was a kindly uncle to him when he was young. But Lisle’s hair of Plantagenet red has faded to russet and now to grey, and age has dimmed him. ‘Well, Cromwell,’ he says; and pats himself down, as if he were looking for a coin to offer. ‘I have your letters daily,’ he says, ‘but we do not often encounter, do we?’
‘Sadly not,’ he says. ‘I trust her ladyship is mended?’
Lisle manages a doleful smile. ‘Her belly is down at last. Poor soul, I never saw a lady more disappointed with her condition.’
‘I want to buy her land at Painswick,’ he says. ‘I will make her a good offer.’
Lisle is amused. ‘You think you could do with a slice of Gloucestershire, do you? Sussex does not satisfy your appetite? Majesty, is there no stopping these new men?’
‘I hope not,’ the king says. ‘I rely on them, sir.’
Lisle rocks back on his heels. ‘I don’t know that we’re selling.’
The king laughs like a boy. ‘Uncle, what a lot you don’t know!’
Henry is in an affable mood, though he is drawing up plans to build forts. I will talk to anyone, he says – talking is cheap, unless it involves the meeting of kings, and even that, he suggests to François, might be managed in a quiet way: why don’t we rendezvous outside Calais? He is still eager to inspect French brides. Perhaps François could bring a selection?
François, his tone dry, says that he sees no point in a meeting. Henry says, ‘Cromwell, François is in breach of his treaty obligations. He owes me four years’ pension. Tell the French that if they do not disburse I will invade them.’
The councillors, alarmed, scurry after him: ‘Cromwell, tell them no such thing!’
Another day, ‘Call Chapuys in,’ the king says. Multiple marriages are on the table: if Mary takes Dom Luis, not only will we throw in young Eliza as a makeweight, but Lady Margaret Douglas can wed some ally of the Emperor, perhaps in Italy. The king will also offer Mary Fitzroy, his dead son’s widow. Chapuys and Mendoza are invited to the palace at Richmond to spend a day with Lady Mary. Once again Mary performs on the lute. Chapuys reports, ‘She speaks fondly of her friend Cremuel.’ He adds in a low voice, smiling, ‘She seems confident you will save her from any unwanted bridegroom.’
With the visit, Mendoza’s mission is over. The king gives him a farewell banquet. ‘The Emperor has paid his London expenses,’ Chapuys says, sulking. ‘And no doubt rewarded him richly. Whereas months have gone by when I have not seen a penny, and am forced to take out loans.’
But now, the French and Imperial ambassadors are meeting and comparing notes, not just about the meanness of their princes but about the games played by the English king and his ministers. They say, our sovereigns are allies now, so why not we? ‘We are issued more news of the infant Edouard,’ Castillon says. ‘We are told he has four teeth. We are terrified, Cremuel.’
The king says, let the ambassadors know I mean to talk to the Duke of Cleves, about his sister. Let us stir them up a little, alarm them. Let them understand, Cromwell, that a match with Cleves has many advantages for me.
As our prince approaches twelve months of age, it is time to appoint his dry nurse. That done, with Mr Wriothesley and on a spare sheet of paper, he works out how to spend the king’s revenue. He wants twenty thousand marks for the repair of harbours
and castles. For the comfort of the poor and sick, Henry will need to refound the hospitals that the monks used to run, and he will need ten thousand marks to get that under way. Then he plans to ask for five thousand marks for employing men without work to mend the highways.
‘You do not give up that notion,’ Wriothesley says.
He tried it before and Parliament would not support it. The king was more favourable. It becomes any prince to look after those without resources, and find them an honest life. Though probably, he says to Mr Wriothesley, King Arthur never occupied himself with such matters. In his day, castles repaired themselves, and all beggars were Christ in disguise.
Our man in Brussels, Hutton, is dead. Mr Wriothesley must get over there, the king says: help Hutton’s widow wrap up her affairs and travel back to England, and get himself into the confidence of the Emperor’s regent, the Queen of Hungary. The regent likes a handsome man, and Mr Wriothesley is both handsome and eloquent. And it is time for Hans to get on the road again. With him goes Philip Hoby of the privy chamber, to play the lover on his monarch’s behalf. He must set forth Henry’s qualities: his liberality, his clemency, his peaceable nature. Is Philip well-briefed? He, Cromwell, draws him aside.
‘Philip, when you go to see one of these ladies – French, Imperial, it is indifferent – you must seem, when you are ushered into her presence, to be silenced by utter astonishment. Your eyes must dart away from her, as if in panic; and then slowly, slowly – as if you hardly dare do it – you must raise your eyes to her face.’
‘Yes, I see,’ Philip Hoby says.
‘And then, once again, you look away. But this time, as if it pained you to do it. Drop your gaze, Philip, and look at your boots, and make a heavy sigh.’
Philip is unable to help himself; he makes one.
‘Next, you stammer through the courtesies. But once again, lose your composure. You pat your person, you search your bag – “Ah, here is my brief!” – all the time, you are aquiver, Philip. You take out your letter. Your fingers fumble. You read: “My master says”, and so forth, “Our council asserts …”’
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 63