Bring Up the Bodies (8 page)

‘I suggest you don't take that up, Wriothesley,' he says amiably. ‘Or at least, Crumb me behind my back. Though I've just been out to the kitchens and Crumb is nothing to what they call the queen.'

Richard Cromwell says, ‘It's the women who keep the poison pot stirred. They don't like man-stealers. They think Anne should be punished.'

‘When we left for the progress she was all elbows,' Gregory says, unexpectedly. ‘Elbows and points and spikes. She looks more plush now.'

‘So she does.' He is surprised the boy has noticed such a thing. The married men, experienced, watch Anne for signs of fattening as keenly as they watch their own wives. There are glances around the table. ‘Well, we shall see. They have not been together the whole summer, but as I judge, enough.'

‘It had better be enough,' Wriothesley says. ‘The king will grow impatient with her. How many years has he waited, for a woman to do her duty? Anne promised him a son if he would wed her, and you wonder, would he do so much for her, if it were all to do again?'

Richard Riche joins them last, with a muttered apology. No heart-shaped bag for this Richard either, though once he would have been just the kind of young gallant to have five in different colours. What a change a decade brings! Riche was once the worst kind of law student, the kind with a file of pleas in mitigation to set against his sins; the kind who seeks out low taverns where lawyers are called vermin, and so is obliged in honour to start a fight; who arrives back at his lodgings in the Temple in the small hours stinking of cheap wine and with his jacket in shreds; the kind who halloos with a pack of terriers over Lincoln's Inn Fields. But Riche is sobered and subdued now, protégé of the Lord Chancellor Thomas Audley, and constantly to and fro between that dignitary and Thomas Cromwell. The boys call him Sir Purse; Purse is getting fatter, they say. The cares of office have fallen on him, the duties of the father of a growing family; once a golden boy, he looks to be covered by a faint patina of dust. Who would have thought he would be Solicitor General? But then he has a good lawyer's brain, and when you want a good lawyer, he is always at hand.

‘Bishop Gardiner's book is not to your purpose,' Riche begins. ‘Sir.'

‘It is not wholly bad. On the king's powers, we concur.'

‘Yes, but,' Riche says.

‘I was moved to quote to Gardiner this text: “Where the word of a king is, there is power, and who shall say to him, what doest thou?”'

Riche raises his eyebrows. ‘Parliament shall.'

Mr Wriothesley says, ‘Trust Master Riche to know what Parliament can do.'

It was on the questions of Parliament's powers, it seems, that Riche tripped Thomas More, tripped and tipped him and perhaps betrayed him into treason. No one knows what was said in that room, in that cell; Riche had come out, pink-faced, hoping and half-suspecting that he had got enough, and gone straight from the Tower of London to him, to Thomas Cromwell. Who had said calmly, yes, this will do; we have him, thank you. Thank you, Purse, you did well.

Now Richard Cromwell leans towards him: ‘Tell us, my little friend Purse: in your good opinion, can Parliament put an heir in the queen's belly?'

Riche blushes a little; he is nearly forty now, but because of his complexion he can still blush. ‘I never said Parliament can do what God will not. I said it could do more than Thomas More would allow.'

‘Martyr More,' he says. ‘The word is in Rome that he and Fisher are to be made saints.' Mr Wriothesley laughs. ‘I agree it is ridiculous,' he says. He darts a look at his nephew: enough now, say nothing more about the queen, her belly or any other part.

For he has confided to Richard Cromwell something at least of the events at Elvetham, at Edward Seymour's house. When the royal party was so suddenly diverted, Edward had stepped up and entertained them handsomely. But the king could not sleep that night, and sent the boy Weston to call him from his bed. A dancing candle flame, in a room of unfamiliar shape: ‘Christ, what time is it?' Six o'clock, Weston said maliciously, and you are late.

In fact it was not four, the sky still dark. The shutter opened to let in air, Henry sat whispering to him, the planets their only witnesses: he had made sure that Weston was out of earshot, refused to speak till the door was shut. Just as well. ‘Cromwell,' the king said, ‘what if I. What if I were to fear, what if I were to begin to suspect, there is some flaw in my marriage to Anne, some impediment, something displeasing to Almighty God?'

He had felt the years roll away: he was the cardinal, listening to the same conversation: only the queen's name then was Katherine.

‘But what impediment?' he had said, a little wearily. ‘What could it be, sir?'

‘I don't know,' the king had whispered. ‘I don't know now but I may know. Was she not pre-contracted to Harry Percy?'

‘No, sir. He swore not, on the Bible. Your Majesty heard him swear.'

‘Ah, but you had been to see him, had you not, Cromwell, did you not trail him to some low inn and haul him up from his bench and pound his head with your fist?'

‘No, sir. I would never so mistreat any peer of the realm, let alone the Earl of Northumberland.'

‘Ah well. I am relieved to hear that. I may have got the details wrong. But that day the earl said what he thought I wanted him to say. He said that there was no union with Anne, no promise of marriage, let alone consummation. What if he lied?'

‘On oath, sir?'

‘But you are very frightening, Crumb. You would make a man forget his manners before God. What if he did lie? What if she made a contract with Percy amounting to a lawful marriage? If that were so, she cannot be married to me.'

He had kept silence, but he saw Henry's mind running; his own was darting like a startled deer. ‘And I much suspect,' the king had whispered. ‘I much suspect her with Thomas Wyatt.'

‘No, sir,' he said, vehement even before he had time to think. Wyatt is his friend; his father, Sir Henry Wyatt, had charged him to make the boy's path smooth; Wyatt is not a boy any more, but never mind.

‘You say no.' Henry leaned towards him. ‘But did not Wyatt avoid the realm and go to Italy, because she would not favour him and he had no peace of mind while her image was before him?'

‘Well, there you have it. You say it yourself, Majesty. She would not favour him. If she had, no doubt he'd have stayed.'

‘But I cannot be sure,' Henry insists. ‘Suppose she denied him then but favoured him some other time? Women are weak and easily conquered by flattery. Especially when men write verses to them, and there are some who say that Wyatt writes better verses than me, though I am the king.'

He blinks at him: four o'clock, sleepless; you could call it harmless vanity, God love him, if only it were not four o'clock. ‘Majesty,' he says, ‘put your mind at rest. If Wyatt had made any inroads on that lady's immaculate chastity, I feel sure he could not have resisted boasting about it. In verse, or common prose.'

Henry only grunts. But he looks up: Wyatt's well-dressed shade, silken, slides across the window, blocks the cold starlight. On your way, phantom: his mind brushes it before him; who can understand Wyatt, who absolve him? The king says, ‘Well. Perhaps. Even if she did give way to Wyatt, it would be no impediment to my marriage, there can be no question of a contract between them since he himself was married as a boy and so not free to promise anything to Anne. But I tell you, it would be impediment to my trust in her. I would not take it kindly to have any woman lie to me, and say she came a virgin to my bed if she did not.'

Wolsey, where are you? You have heard all this before. Advise me now.

He stands up. He is easing this interview to an end. ‘Shall I tell them to bring you something, sir? Something to help you sleep again for an hour or two?'

‘I need something to sweeten my dreams. I wish I knew what it was. I have consulted Bishop Gardiner in this matter.'

He had tried to keep the shock off his face. Gone to Gardiner: behind my back?

‘And Gardiner said,' Henry's face was the picture of desolation, ‘he said there was doubt enough in the case, but that if the marriage were not good, if I were forced to put away Anne, I must return to Katherine. And I cannot do it, Cromwell. I am resolved that even if the whole of Christendom comes against me, I can never touch that stale old woman again.'

‘Well,' he had said. He was looking at the floor, at Henry's large white naked feet. ‘I think we can do better than that, sir. I do not pretend to follow Gardiner's reasoning, but then the bishop knows more canon law than me. I do not believe, however, you can be constrained or compelled in any matter, as you are master of your own household, and your own country, and of your own church. Perhaps Gardiner meant only to prepare Your Majesty for the obstacles others might raise.'

Or perhaps, he thought, he just meant to make you sweat and give you nightmares. Gardiner's like that. But Henry had sat up: ‘I can do as it pleases me,' his monarch said. ‘God would not allow my pleasure to be contrary to his design, nor my designs to be impeded by his will.' A shadow of cunning had crossed his face. ‘And Gardiner himself said so.'

Henry yawned. It was a signal. ‘Crumb, you don't look very dignified, bowing in a nightgown. Will you be ready to ride at seven, or shall we leave you behind and see you at supper?'

If you'll be ready, I'll be ready, he thinks, as he pads back to his bed. Come sunrise, will you forget we ever had this conversation? The court will be astir, the horses tossing their heads and sniffing the wind. By mid-morning we will be reunited with the queen's band; Anne will be chirruping atop her hunter; she will never know, unless her little friend Weston tells her, that last night at Elvetham the king sat gazing at his next mistress: Jane Seymour ignoring his pleading eyes, and placidly working her way through a chicken. Gregory had said, his eyes round: ‘Doesn't Mistress Seymour eat a lot?'

And now the summer is over. Wolf Hall, Elvetham, fade into the dusk. His lips are sealed on the king's doubts and fears; it is autumn, he is at Austin Friars; with bowed head he listens to the court news, watches Riche's fingers twisting the silk tag on a document. ‘Their households have been provoking each other in the streets,' his nephew Richard says. ‘Thumbing of noses, curses, hands on daggers.'

‘Sorry, who?' he says.

‘Nicholas Carew's people. Scrapping with Lord Rochford's servants.'

‘As long as they keep it away from the court,' he says sharply. The penalty for drawing a blade within the precincts of the royal court is amputation of the offending hand. What is the quarrel about, he begins to ask, then changes his question: ‘What is their excuse?'

For picture Carew, one of Henry's old friends, one of his privy chamber gentlemen, and devoted to the queen that was. See him, an antique man with his long grave face, his cultivated air of having stepped straight from a book of knight-errantry. No surprise if Sir Nicholas, with his rigid sense of the fitness of things, has found it impossible to bend to George Boleyn's parvenu pretensions. Sir Nicholas is a papist to his steel-capped toes, and is offended to his marrow by George's support of reformed teaching. So an issue of principle lies between them; but what trivial event has sparked the quarrel into life? Did George and his evil company make a racket outside the chamber of Sir Nicholas, while he was at some solemn business like admiring himself in the looking glass? He stifles a smile. ‘Rafe, have a word with both gentlemen. Tell them to leash their dogs.' He adds, ‘You do right to mention it.' He is interested, always, to hear of divisions between the courtiers and how they arose.

Soon after his sister became queen, George Boleyn had called him in and given him some instruction, about how he should handle his career. The young man was flaunting a bejewelled gold chain, which he, Cromwell, weighed in his mind's eye; in his mind's eye he removed George's jacket, unstitched it, wound the fabric on to the bolt and priced it; once you have been in the cloth trade, you don't lose your eye for texture and drape, and if you are charged with raising revenue, you soon learn to estimate a man's worth.

Young Boleyn had kept him standing, while he occupied the room's single chair. ‘Remember, Cromwell,' he began, ‘that though you are of the king's council, you are not a gentleman born. You should confine yourself to speech where it is demanded of you, and for the rest, leave it alone. Do not meddle in the affairs of those set above you. His Majesty is pleased to bring you often into his presence, but remember who it was who placed you where he could see you.'

It's interesting, George Boleyn's version of his life. He had always supposed it was Wolsey who trained him up, Wolsey who promoted him, Wolsey who made him the man he is: but George says no, it was the Boleyns. Clearly, he has not been expressing proper gratitude. So he expresses it now, saying yes sir and no sir, and I see you are a man of singular good judgement for your years. Why, your father Monseigneur the Earl of Wiltshire, your uncle Thomas Howard Duke of Norfolk, they could not have instructed me better. ‘I shall profit by this, I assure you sir, and from now on conduct myself more humble-wise.'

George was mollified. ‘See you do.'

He smiles now, thinking of it; returns to the scribbled agenda. His son Gregory's eyes flit about the table, as he tries to pick up what isn't said: now cousin Richard Cromwell, now Call-Me-Risley, now his father, and the other gentlemen who have come in. Richard Riche frowns over his papers, Call-Me fiddles with his pen. Troubled men both, he thinks, Wriothesley and Riche, and alike in some ways, sidling around the peripheries of their own souls, tapping at the walls: oh, what is that hollow sound? But he has to produce to the king men of talent; and they are agile, they are tenacious, they are unsparing in their efforts for the Crown, and for themselves.