He lives in dread that the king will stop Rafe’s visits. But it appears that the king still wishes him to have some news. Lord Hungerford is under sentence of death, Rafe says. ‘The French ambassador is spreading the rumour he has raped his daughter. But no such charge has been brought. There is enough with the sorcery and the sodomy.’
‘Marillac is emboldened,’ he says, ‘after all the rumours he has spread about me. There seem to be no consequences.’
He cannot find it in his heart to be sorry for Hungerford: except he is sorry for any confined creature, who knows his next outing will be his death. He would like Wolsey to come in so they could have a game of chess: though you should never play chess with a prelate, they always have a pawn in their sleeves. He craves the sight of Thomas More, with his grey stubble of beard and his tired eyes, sitting at the table as he used to do: that table which had taken on the aspect of an altar, the candle flame tugged by a draught. In the wet spring of 1535, More had a trick of absenting himself from the scene, so that what sat before you appeared already dead, a carcass, like the silvery corpse that you find in a spider’s web when the spider has died at home.
They speak of More as a martyr now, instead of a man who miscalculated the odds. He had said to Chapuys, More thought he could manipulate Henry, and perhaps he was right; but then he met what he had not reckoned on, he met Anne Boleyn. We councillors think we are men of vision and learning, we gravely delineate our position, set forth our plans and argue our case far into the night. Then some little girl sweeps through and upsets the candle and sets fire to our sleeve; leaves us slapping ourselves like madmen, trying to save our skin. It rankles with me, that some sneak thief like Riche should best me; that a fool like Polo should hole my boat, and a dolt like Lisle should drown me. Perhaps some people will say I have died for the gospel, as More died for the Pope. But most will not think me a martyr for anything, except the great cause of getting on in life.
By mid-month, the king is a single man again. Convocation first, then Parliament has acted to free him. Anna has agreed to everything proposed to her, and given back her wedding ring. Rafe says, ‘Parliament will petition the king to marry again. For the safety and comfort of the realm. However disinclined he feels, personally.’ He sighs. Master Secretary’s chain weighs heavy.
No rain falls. The heat does not falter. It seems Henry means to kill his slave through sheer disuse. The Visconti in Milan devised a torture regime that lasted for forty days, and on the fortieth day, though not before, the prisoner died. On the first day, you might cut off the man’s ear. Next day he rests. On the third day, gouge out an eye. He rests; he has another eye, but he does not know when you will choose to blind him. On day five, you will begin to tear off his skin in strips. This is not for any information he might give you. This is merely to make a spectacle, to overawe the city.
The third week in July his interrogators return, bringing fresh charges of corruption. There is a case that has been dragging on two years now, about a ship belonging to the brother of the Constable of France. He has the facts in his head, and he is sure he is clear in the matter, but he sees there is no defence against the version the French present. François is intent on hurrying him to the scaffold. ‘I don’t die quick enough for his liking,’ he says to Gardiner.
‘I doubt it will be long now,’ the bishop says. ‘Any day now the king will sign your attainder into law. Parliament will be rising. His Majesty will want to leave London for the summer.’
‘How is Norfolk’s niece?’
Gardiner looks gloomy. ‘Very pleased with her great fortune. A giddy little creature. Still, not for me to question the king’s choice.’
‘Bear that in mind,’ he says, ‘and you’ll go far, boy.’ He smiles. ‘Of course she is giddy. What else, at that age? You would not want her to think too much. History is against her.’
Gardiner looks pensive: ‘I fear it’s against us all.’
It is a busy day at the Bell Tower; Norfolk comes after, with more papers about the French ship. ‘You are to write to the council about it.’
‘Not to the king himself?’
‘Write by all means. I do suppose, though, he will be too occupied with my niece to read it.’
‘Has he said how I am to die, my lord?’
Norfolk does not answer. ‘My son Surrey says, if you had been left to run your course, you would have left no nobleman alive. He says, now is Cromwell stricken by his own staff. Now it is with him as it has been with many a man who has crossed him, both simple and grand.’
‘I do not dispute it,’ he says. ‘But it might give my lord Surrey pause, to imagine how he would order himself were he to find himself a prisoner here. Fortune and the king have raised him high, but he should not trust to that, the ground beneath our feet is slippery.’
‘I’ll tell him,’ Norfolk says. ‘By God, you wax sententious! Wise men have no need of such warnings. They wash their eyes clean every day. You think the king ever loved you? No. To him you were an instrument. As I am. A device. You and me, my son Surrey, we are no more to him than a trebuchet, a catapult, or any other engine of war. Or a dog. A dog who has served him through the hunting season. What do you do with a dog, when the season ends? You hang it.’
Norfolk ambles out. He can hear him talking to Martin outside the door, but he cannot make out what he says. ‘Christophe,’ he calls. ‘Paper and ink.’
Christophe is surprised. ‘Once again?’
He writes to the council. He denies he profited from the misfortune of the constable’s brother or his ship. Norfolk knows, he writes, he was present when the matter was aired; Fitzwilliam knows about it, and Bishop Bonner, he was envoy in France, he will remember the whole affair. For an hour, thinking and writing, he is taken out of himself, as if he were back at the council board. Straight away, he begins a letter to Henry. He has a good deal to say, but he knows that if the letter strays outside the conventions of supplication, Henry will not be able to hear it – not three times, not even once. Is it possible for a man to abase himself more than he has already? By mid-afternoon, he is weary. He gives it up. He puts down the pen and allows his mind to range. Chapuys is back in London, reappointed ambassador. Back at the old game, he thinks. Henry makes a bow to the French, then a genuflection to the Emperor. The cardinal would recognise it all.
That night when Wolsey comes blinking in, he says to him, ‘Be my good father. Stay with me till this is over.’
‘I’d like to stay,’ the old man says, ‘but I don’t know if I have the strength.’ He seems, muttering in the corner, to be preoccupied with his own end. He talks about the candles around his deathbed, George Cavendish gripping his hand. He describes the drawn faces of the monks at Leicester Abbey, peering down at him. He talks of his hasty burial, which he seems to know all about. ‘Why do I not have my right tomb,’ he says, ‘when I paid so much to that Italian of yours? Where are my great candlesticks? My dancing angels, where did they go?’
Martin, out of his charity, comes to sit with him. In More’s last days, the gaoler says, he talked a lot – he always did talk, just not when you wanted him to. He would talk of when he was a little boy, a scholar at St Anthony’s school. He would bear his satchel down West Cheap towards Threadneedle Street. On a winter’s morning at six o’clock, the streets were lit only by the frost on the cobblestones. St Anthony’s pigs, they called them, those little schoolfellows; by lantern light they assembled to chant their Latin.
‘Did he ever talk about Lambeth, about the palace?’
‘What, Archbishop Cranmer? He hated him.’
‘I mean, Lambeth in Morton’s day, when we were young. Thomas More was there as a boy, getting ready for Oxford, day after day at his books. Did he mention me?’
‘You? What had you to do with it, sir?’
He smiles. ‘I was there too.’
Uncle John says, ‘See the trays? That’s the you
ng gentlemen’s suppers. They’re all studying hard, so if they wake up in the night, they’re turning over in their head a hard problem about Pythagoras, or St Jerome. And it makes them peckish. So they need a little bite of bread in their cupboards, and a measure of small beer. Now, boy, you know the third staircase? Up the top there’s Master Thomas More. He don’t like disturbing, so you creep in like a mouse. If he looks up you make your reverence. If he don’t you just creep out again, and not so much as a “Bless you.” Have you got that?’
He’s got it. He’s got the tray in his grasp, and he sets off on the sturdy legs that would make you think he was well-fed. What if he sat down on the bottom step, and ate the bread and drank the beer himself? Would he hear in the night Master More crying out with pangs in his belly? ‘Oh, feed me, feed me,’ he whimpers in a pitiful voice, as he mounts. ‘Oh, St Jerome, feed me!’
On the top step, the devil enters into him. He kicks open the door and bawls, ‘Master Thomas More!’
The young scholar looks up. His expression is mild and curious but he circles his book with his arm as if to protect it.
‘Master Thomas More, his supper!’
He rams it in the corner cupboard. ‘Hinge wants oiling,’ he says. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow and see to that.’ He creaks it to and fro, so it makes a double squeak. He wants to ask, what’s Pythagoras, is it an animal, is it a disease, is it a shape you can draw?
‘Master Thomas More, God bless him!’ he shouts. ‘Good night!’
He is about to slam the door when Master More calls, ‘Child?’ He intrudes himself back into the room. Master More sits blinking at him. He is fourteen, fifteen, skinny. Walter would laugh him out of the yard. Master More says softly, ‘If I gave you a penny, would you not do that, another night?’
He bounces down the stair richer. He bounces on every tread, and whistles. Fair’s fair. He was only paid to be quiet in the room, not quiet outside it. Master More will have to dig deeper into his pocket if he wants to live in the silence of the tomb. He runs away, towards his football game.
After that, every night he would lurk on the stair like a demon, till More thought the danger was passed. Then he’d burst in, bellowing ‘How do you, sir?’ slapping his tray down so that More splashed his ink. When More reminded him about the penny he’d paid, he opened his eyes wide: ‘I thought that was one time only?’
With a sigh and a half-smile, Master More disbursed.
He thought Thomas More would complain about him to the kitchen steward, who would call him in and hit him. Or perhaps the archbishop himself would call him in and hit him; or being a man of God, only harangue him. If that happened, he was planning to harangue him back. There were things old Morton should know, about how his kitchen was run: pewter that jumped off the table into some blackguard’s sack, fingers that dipped straight from a laundrymaid’s quim and into the fricassee.
But no one called him in. No one hit him: except the usual people, his father Walter, his sisters, his uncles, his aunts, the priest if he could catch him, Sion Madoc’s dad, different members of the Williams family, the Wycks family … but it seemed Thomas More had not hit him, even by proxy. The blow was held in suspension; he felt it hovering in the air, in those years when More used to hunt out heresy, and raid the homes and shops of his friends in the city. And when the blow fell, it was from another direction entirely; it was More who suffered, bundled to the scaffold on a wet July day, one of those days when the wind seems to come at you from all directions at once: the flutter of his shirt as he stood with neck bared, rivulets like tears running down his face, and a fine mist lying over the walls of the Tower, seeming to melt them into the grey, swollen river. It was an easy death, as these things go: a single stroke.
When they met as grown men, More had not remembered him at all.
Eustache Chapuys has returned to a London that is much changed: air sullen with suspicion, a queen come and gone. The king is sweeping up not only those he deems heretics, but also remnants of papistry, so the gaols are full. The ambassador looks fatigued and frail, they say, and expresses no joy at being back in his old post. He, Cromwell, knows there is no point in asking for a visit – being a man of sense Chapuys would not come near him – but he wonders, will he be there when I suffer? He does not want his son to be there, even if it is a simple beheading; he remembers how Gregory suffered at the death of Anne Boleyn, who was a stranger to him. He says to Rafe, ‘It is time for Gregory to write a letter repudiating me. He should speak ill of me. Say he does not know how he comes to be related to such a traitor. He should plead for the chance to redeem my errors and crimes, by serving his Majesty in the years to come.’
‘Yes,’ Rafe says, ‘but you know Gregory’s letters. And now no more for lack of time.’ He pauses. ‘I have had his wife Bess do it. Being the sister of the late Queen Jane, she was best placed, I thought, to touch the king’s heart.’
He thinks, I was always quick in everything; but Rafe Sadler, he is quick when it matters. ‘Even in the midst of his new happiness, I do not doubt he will remember Jane.’
Rafe says, ‘It is forbidden to wear mourning for the death of a traitor. But Richard Cromwell says he will do it.’
‘He should not,’ he says mildly. ‘Tell him it is not what I advise.’
All the same, he smiles. Rafe looks around. ‘Shall I ask Edmund Walsingham to move you elsewhere? It makes me uneasy, this place.’
‘You get used to it. If you stand on that stool, you can get a view of the Byward Tower. Try it.’
Rafe cannot see out, because he is too short. But the attempt allows him to keep his face to the wall till he is composed, and then embrace his master a last time, and go out into the hot afternoon.
When the door has closed, and Rafe’s footsteps and voice have faded away, he opens his books. Volumes of legends, compendiums of saints: legends of consolation. Thank God they did not take them away; but he thinks, I must make sure they do not go astray, after. I must leave a letter about those few possessions I retain, and hope it will be honoured.
He reads the book of Erasmus, Preparation unto Death: written only five, six years back, under the patronage of Thomas Boleyn. It tires his eyes; he would rather look at pictures. He lays the book aside and turns the pages of his engravings. He sees Icarus, his wings melting, plummeting into the waves. It was Daedalus who invented the wings and made the first flight, he more circumspect than his son: scraping above the labyrinth, bobbing over walls, skimming the ocean so low his feet were wet. But then as he rose on the breeze, peasants gaped upwards, supposing they were seeing gods or giant moths; and as he gained height there must have been an instant when the artificer knew, in his pulse and his bones, This is going to work. And that instant was worth the rest of his life.
On the afternoon of 27 July, both the constable and the lieutenant come in. Kingston says, ‘Sir, the king grants you mercy as to the manner of your death. It is to be the axe, and may I say that I rejoice to hear it –’ Kingston breaks off. ‘I beg your lordship’s pardon – I mean to say, your lordship has often sought such mercy for others, and seldom failed.’
So I won’t see August, he thinks. The hares that flee the harvester, the cold morning dews after St Bartholomew’s Day. Or the leaf fall, the dark blue nights.
‘Will it be tomorrow?’
Kingston is not supposed to tell him. But Walsingham says smoothly, ‘If your lordship said your prayers tonight, you would do well.’
Kingston gives up the pretence. ‘I shall come about the accustomed hour of nine, and with you will go Lord Hungerford.’
So I am to die with a monster, he thinks. Or a man who has made monstrous enemies, who have great imaginative powers to shape the condemned to their desires.
Walsingham says, ‘Will you have a confessor?’
‘I will if I can have Robert Barnes.’
The two officers look at each other. ‘You should
know he is condemned,’ the lieutenant says. ‘He will go to Smithfield in a day or so.’
‘Alone?’
‘With the priest Garrett, and Father William Jerome. We are waiting for our orders. And certain papists are expected to hang in a day or two: Thomas Abel, that was chaplain to the Princess of Aragon.’
Garrett, Jerome: friends of his and of the gospel. Abel, a veteran opponent. A crowded week, he thinks. ‘I hope there are enough competent people.’
Kingston says testily, ‘We do our best.’
He stands up. He wishes to be left alone. ‘It is not long since I confessed, and I have had scant opportunity of sin since I came here.’
‘That is not it.’ Kingston is disconcerted. ‘You are meant to pass your whole life in review, and discover new sins each time.’
‘I know that,’ he says. ‘I know how to do it. I live here with Thomas More. I have read the books. We are all dying, just at different speeds.’
Walsingham says, ‘The Duke of Norfolk has asked that your lordship be informed – the king marries Katherine Howard tomorrow.’
Christophe says, ‘I will bring my pallet. I will stay beside you tonight.’
‘You need not fear,’ he says. ‘I shall not put an end to myself. I shall trust the headsman to do it quicker than I could.’
‘You will write letters?’
He thinks about it. ‘No. I am done.’
He sends Christophe out to bask in the sunshine: to drink his health, and sit, drowsy, on a wall, among other servants, talking no doubt of the uncertainty of their fortune, with such masters.
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 94