Thomas Cromwell 1-3

II

Corpus Christi

June–December 1538

Wyatt has followed the Emperor from the shores of Spain to Nice, where Charles has disembarked to meet the Pope and the King of France. Their meeting is like some ill-starred conjunction in the heavens, which we could forecast but not prevent. Early June, Wyatt is in England, pacing a room at St James’s. The Lord Privy Seal, sitting in a splash of weak sun, follows him with his eyes.

‘I saw Farnese,’ Wyatt says. ‘Close enough to spit. With Polo leaning on his shoulder, conspiring in his papal ear. I should have spitted him on my dagger, and carried home his collops.’

Wherever the Emperor goes, Wyatt jolts after him, with his household of twenty or so young gallants: all armed, all poets, all lovers, all dicers. From Nice, Charles has sent him home with an enticement. If Lady Mary will marry Dom Luis, he will settle the duchy of Milan on them: Milan, his greatest prize, over which he and François have fought for years.

‘But he will never give up Milan,’ Wyatt says. ‘Not this side of the Last Judgement. And they are asking for an outrageous sum with Mary. The king should offer two-thirds.’

Always a good rule of thumb: knock a third off, see what answer you get. Wyatt says, ‘But then I don’t know if the king intends to let Mary go. Or if he even intends to marry himself, or is just playing a game with them all, and keeping Hans employed.’

He shrugs: I do not know anything.

‘I hate Spain,’ Wyatt says. ‘I would prefer the lowest cell in Newgate. And I cannot understand the Emperor. I cannot read him in any language. I hear the words he says, but nothing that lies between them. His face never changes. Sometimes he admits me every day. Sometimes I arrive and his servants shut me out. I think, have I committed some breach of manners? Is it reasonable to stand outside his presence chamber two days, or three, or until they sweep me out with the rushes? If I am told to quit his realm, do I pay my bills and leave my compliments, or do I run in the clothes I stand up in?’

‘It is prince’s tricks,’ he says. ‘Three days in a row Henry gives the French a private audience. Then he ignores them for a week.’

‘When he shuts me out I write my dispatches. I translate Seneca. I keep no company with women, whatever you hear, but with a skin of bad wine and the gospel. In Spain the women are cloistered. Husbands kill you on suspicion. If the Earl of Worcester were Spanish, you and his wife would be skewered and mouldy in your graves.’

‘I never had to do with Worcester’s wife,’ he says. ‘But it is just as when I say “I am not a Lutheran.” Nobody believes me.’

‘The Inquisitors in Toledo think all Englishmen are Lutherans. They have tried to put spies in my house. They offered money to my servants. Letters were stolen.’

‘I have warned you, lock up what you write. Prose or verse.’

Wyatt looks uneasy. ‘At first I thought it was you.’

He would not deny it; he has a man with Wyatt, as he has men with Gardiner in France. He sighs: ‘It is as much for your protection as anything else. My agents would not steal your letters, only read them at your desk. I am surprised at the freedom the Emperor gives the Inquisitors. Do not provoke them. You should show your face at Mass.’

‘No greater beadsman,’ Wyatt says. ‘I can mop and mow to an altar with the best of them.’

Heresy knows no borders, the Inquisitors declare. No traveller of any nation is exempt from our enquiries. And what could the King of England do, if they threw his envoy in a dungeon? He could make representations; but meanwhile, they could have bored a needle through our envoy’s tongue, or pulled out his fingernails.

A clerk comes in with a sheaf of papers. ‘From Sir Richard Riche, my lord. He said, never hesitate, but go straight in. This will rejoice Lord Cromwell, he said.’

He says to Wyatt, ‘I am augmented. I am to have the priory at Michelham. Gregory and I are writing our names on the chalk hills of Sussex. You too will have your reward.’ Even if posthumously, he thinks.

Wyatt watches the clerk out. He sits down. ‘Last year in France – Henry does not know this – Pole approached me. He sent presents. And a letter, wrapped around a flask of good wine.’

‘And?’

‘I read the letter. Francis Bryan drank the wine.’

‘Ah, Francis. How did he take to Nice?’

‘He gambled,’ Wyatt says, ‘as ever. The town stank like Hell, it was crammed to the rafters with papists, but Francis thrives on it. He plays for high stakes with the chancellors of great men, their familiar creatures, and he sleeps with their women. I could not prosper without him. I would learn nothing.’ Wyatt hesitates. ‘It seems to me I could approach our man Pole. I could contrive a meeting.’

He nods. ‘But remember no one has authorised you to make contact. I have not. The king has not.’

Wyatt curses. ‘When I am face to face with my opportunity, must I refuse it? What am I to do – send back to Westminster for instructions? Has Henry no faith in my judgement? If he wants an envoy, he should send who he trusts, and trust who he sends. And if he wants words and no deeds, let him choose some other man. I would kill Pole as soon as look at him.’

‘Well, that would terminate your embassy, for sure.’ He averts his face. ‘As it is, Henry will send you back, no matter how you squall.’

‘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 Butts 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 …”’

‘I keep losing my place, do I?’

‘Then you cast the paper aside, as a thing you scorn. You burst out: “Madam, I must speak. Reports allude to the brightness of your eye, the sweetness of your lip, the freshness of your youthful complexion. Yet those reports fail to capture even a particle of the loveliness it is now my privilege to behold.”

‘At this point, Philip,’ he says, ‘you must put your hand on your heart. What she must perceive is, “Ah, this envoy is in love with me!”

‘She will smile on you. She will pity you. Look abashed, but let her draw you out. “Alas, madam, you are for princes, not for such a humble man as I be. Yet I could be consoled, if I saw you Queen of England – matched with so noble, so puissant, and so benign a prince.” While she is fluttering, move quick. Get her to agree to a portrait.’

‘Get Hans in,’ Philip says. ‘I see.’

He claps him on the shoulder. ‘I have faith in you.’

Rafe says, ‘Sir, now I have heard how these things are managed, I am surprised you have no wife yourself. I am surprised you have not a thousand wives.’

Late summer he rides down to Lewes to see Gregory and his grandson. Plague has not only prevented the king’s visit but forced his son’s household from the abbey site. But Gregory has refuges within a few miles, a choice of quiet and commodious manor houses. The baby thrives. The marriage, one judges, is happy. Poor Jane is lost, but her sister keeps her value. The young prince needs good uncles and protectors: Edward Seymour remains a councillor, and his brother Tom is in the privy chamber.

If Gregory still thinks about the misunderstanding over his bride, he shows no sign of concern. Father and son ride out together in the evening, the sun a perfect crimson orb above the line of the downs. The sky has become a mirror, against which the sun moves: light without shadow, like the light at the beginning of the world. Gregory’s chatter stills; the creak of harness, the breathing of the horses, seems to muffle itself, so they move in silence, outlined against silver, tall against the sky; and as the upland fades into a pillowy distance, he feels himself riding into nowhere, a blank, where only memory stirs. He thinks of those who he has known who have died by fire, as if they have fallen into the sun. Little Bilney; the sour and obstinate Tyndale; the young and tender John Frith.

When they ride down to their supper, the light is the colour of pigeons’ feathers. He hands over his horse and puts on his public face. The gentry of east Sussex must be entertained, both early and late. Bess is a practised hostess, having filled the role for her first husband. Gregory is ebullient, good company, but still eager to listen and learn; his eyes travel often to his father’s face. ‘I wish Richard were here,’ Gregory says. But Richard is setting up his household in Huntingdonshire, augmented by several abbeys. Around November, he thinks, I shall want Richard myself, to help me at the Tower.

At the end of August he arrests Geoffrey Pole. He is the youngest of the tribe and the least trusted – by his family, by his prince, and by himself.

He is in no hurry with Geoffrey. He is housed in circumstances that befit a gentleman who is cousin to the king. He is sure Reginald Pole can read the signal he sends. Reginald still has time to save his family. He can come home, and meet Henry face to face.

In the meantime he consults his memory and his files. He looks out reports from people close to the Poles: chaplains, servants, messengers and go-betweens. He sifts through papers from the days when the false prophetess arose in Kent and was entertained by the Courtenays. He combs through his transcript of the talks he had with Francis Bryan, two years back when he held him in the Tower. Francis is a mine of implication. His least word is a treasure trove of hints for the suspicious mind.

He is preparing to bring down two of the richest and most noble families in England. They have land all over the southern and western counties. If the Emperor invades he will set one of them on the throne: either Montague, Pole’s brother, or Henry Courtenay, the Marquis of Exeter. If they choose to make Mary queen, it will be for her mother’s sake; they will marry her into one family or the other, and make her their puppet, dancing between them.

The grandees of England claim descent from emperors and angels. To them, Henry Tudor is the son of Welsh horse-thieves: a parvenu, a usurper, a man to whom oaths may be broken.

In Canterbury, early July, he and the king had watched the new Becket play, devised by his man John Bale and acted by Lord Cromwell’s Men. Some are survivors from George Boleyn’s troupe. Some are young actors, not afraid of fresh plots, nor superstitious about putting new lines in the mouths of the dead.

Becket is England’s saint, more proximate than St George. He was a real man, unlike some saints destroyed this summer; he was a Londoner, native of Cheapside. Before he was born his mother dreamed the river Thames was flowing through her body. She dreamed that her baby was out of her already, and lay on a purple blanket, looking up at the roof; the blanket unfolded by itself, and overspilled the bed, and overspilled the room, and she walked backwards, holding its hem, until she was walking to the rim of the universe, among the moon and stars.

Some say Becket’s mother was a Saracen princess, but more likely she was a draper’s daughter. Her son came from nothing, and rose by the king’s favour to be Lord Chancellor, archbishop too. But once elevated he scorned princes, believing the old lie that popes are set above them; he thought all priests were above the law. When his king cried out against him, four loyal knights departed to Canterbury, to show him his errors.

These knights left their arms under a mulberry tree, and walked empty-handed to meet the archbishop. But finding him arrogant, hard-hearted and incapable of amendment, they picked up their weapons and pursued him into the cathedral, their metal feet ringing on the stonework. Becket could have hidden in the roof or crypt. Instead he stood by the altar of St Benedict, awaiting his dispatch.

The knights struck him with the flat of the sword, ordering him off holy ground. But Becket held up his hands and rolled his eyes to Heaven, swearing he would die where he stood. The first blow drew blood, which the archbishop wiped off with his sleeve. A second blow split his skull and brought him to his knees. He toppled forward, face down, and the broadsword of Richard le Breton swiped off the top of his skull. Then Sir Hugh de Morville planted his foot on the neck of the dying man, raked out the brains, and smeared them over the flags; adding, as a man of sense would, ‘Now he will not get up again.’

As soon as the townspeople knew the killing was done, they crowded into the abbey, wailing and crying out against the knights. The monks crammed the corpse in a stone coffin and buried it in haste. But they took care to mark the spot where Becket died. The miracles began after two days. Frozen arms jerked in their sockets. Cripples danced. Hot as a devil’s fart, word rattled around Europe that the knave was a martyr for our Holy Mother Church, whereas really he was a martyr for his own pride. Within two years the Pope made him a saint. The clamour for relics began. His blood, diluted so only the memory of it remained, was sold through the known world. The spot the monks had marked became his shrine. Even the lice from his hair shirt were sacred. Fifty years after his death his remains were placed inside a new and rich feretory, on a platform behind the high altar. Soon the faithful had plated the chest in gold and studded it with gemstones. The King of France gave a ruby the size of a hen’s egg. Queen Katherine was often a pilgrim here. The Emperor Charles has prayed to the bones.

As for the guilty knights, they went to Rome and grovelled. The Pope sent them to the Holy Land to serve, knowing they would never come back alive. Becket was a vengeful man and his rancour did not die with him. In a Kentish town where the folk had laughed at him, he caused a generation of children to be born with tails. And in another place where he had been slighted he banished all the nightingales, so that to this day their song is never heard, neither by lover nor poet.

Each season the people of Canterbury re-enact Becket’s death: it is the monkish version, because till now no other kind of history has been available. Crowds line the streets – excited, as if the tale might come out different this year. Hot pasties are sold. There are processions with drummers and pipes, and then the show begins. The knights get tuppence and some beer, but the lad who plays the saint gets a shilling, for the knights make him suffer, smashing him on the flags as the old archbishop was smashed. As Becket calls on Christ, a child crouching behind the altar squirts the scene with pig’s blood. The actor is carried away. Then everybody gets drunk.

September: he himself, Lord Cromwell, arrives in Canterbury and calls together the worthies. These are not easy times for you gentlemen, but you must know that the king hates your saint, and if you want to keep your town’s privileges you will show him your loyalty by keeping the streets quiet. It is true you will lose money when the pilgrims stop coming. But gentlemen, build up trade: don’t cry on my shoulder, when here you are in rich wool country, surrounded by great harbours. You cannot continue an abuse which is an affront to reason, just because folk from overseas come by the thousand to gawp at it.

The town is full. He stays at the prior’s lodgings, but every room is taken at the Porpoise, the Dolphin and the Mitre, at the Sun, the Crown and the Checker. The Bull Inn has even filled the bad rooms at the back, that overlook the shambles on Butchery Lane. The monks have had plenty of notice. They are not offering any resistance. They are only glad the priory itself is to remain open – or rather, be refounded by the king. Becket’s shrine is not the first to be broken. The method is to strip the precious metals and gems, weigh and value them, and arrange transport to the king’s treasury. Then, rebury the supposed saint in some decent but obscure spot.

On a fine autumn night they clear the precincts of the cathedral. Prior Goldwell begs to be excused the exhumation and retires to bed. The Vicegerent’s party sits by the hearth till the small hours. When the night office is done, the hour for Lauds approaching, he gives the nod to Dr Layton, his commissioner.

A young monk leads them by a short route to the burial site. Keys turn behind them, bolts are slammed, bars dropped into their guards. The vast nave stretches away, a black and echoing expanse in which he has set men with dogs. He can hear their scrambling paws and their panting as they strain at their leashes. These are ban-dogs. Their jaws are like vices. They will nab any intruder and have him on the floor screaming. ‘Sweeper!’ their keepers call. ‘Sturdy!’ ‘Diamond!’ ‘Jack!’

The monks of the advance party have lit torches around the tomb. He walks towards the light. He counts his witnesses: Layton’s clerks, the chosen townsfolk. He wants every man where he can see him, no one loitering in the cavernous space. ‘Loose the dogs.’

In the space of a breath, the black void fills with snarling. ‘Jesu,’ Christophe says. ‘They sound like roving demons.’

He puts out a hand and finds the boy’s shoulder. ‘Stick close.’ Even a Frenchman knows the legends of the shrine. As for those huddled bystanders from the town – guild officials, aldermen – they have been brought up on stories of those who, mishandling a saint’s relics, were consumed by plague or leprosy, or were choked by invisible nooses and died twitching on the floor.

‘We are ready,’ he says. A monk is walking towards him and his eye catches the glint of metal. His hand flies to his chest, to his knife. But as the man steps into the flicker of light he sees it is not a weapon he is holding but Becket’s skull. He has it tucked against his robes, as if it were a shy pet animal that feels the cold.

‘Give it here,’ he says. A cap of silver holds together the crazed fragments of bone. The lips of thousands have grazed this relic; but he is a whore’s client with no time for kissing. He holds Becket up, eye to hollow eye; he looks into his vacancy. He turns the skull up, to see where it was chopped from the backbone. There is no record that the four knights cut off Becket’s head. His admirers did that, later.

‘Shall we have a look at the rest of him?’ Dr Layton asks.

Now that the jewels and gilding are prised off, what rests on the flags is a serviceable iron chest, such as our forefathers used time out of mind. His fingertips graze its surface: common rust. ‘Jesus, Layton,’ he says, ‘the monks missed a chance here, they could have scraped down the rust every spring and sold it for more than you could charge for powdered unicorn.’

‘Hold up a light,’ Layton says.

The chest has been sealed around with lead. ‘See if it is still tight.’ A workman crouches and examines the seal, feeling his way along the join. Dr Layton squats beside him: ‘You would swear it has not been disturbed in years, my lord.’

Their anxiety is that the bones have been stolen by some dissident monk: that they have been sent by a courier to Rome, or tucked in some private ossuary till old times come again. But if the seal is intact, ‘I could have been in my feather bed, Dr Layton.’

‘Oh, I would not miss this,’ Layton says. ‘Not personally.’

The workman straightens up. ‘Shall we do off the lid, sirs?’

A monk says, ‘God in His mercy protect us.’

He is aware that some of the witnesses are retreating from the circle. ‘Don’t go too far, or the dogs will have you.’ The workman is a stonemason, and has brought his own bag of tools. A blacksmith, he thinks, made them all. Some nameless smith three centuries past melted the lead to make the seal which we will now split and rip. He says, give us a chisel. He fingers the business end, passes it back. Some smiths cannot make chisels, or punches either – they have to re-dress them after every job. Walter used to say, you must wait, wait, wait, till the colour fades from sunset-red to ash. It’s the last three hammer blows that count.

Each blow rings. One, two, three. He would rip open the chest himself, but: dignity of his office, the king’s Vicegerent, Cromwell of Wimbledon, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal. Knight of the Garter.

The mason exhales as he stands up. He walks around the chest and repositions himself, kneeling.

‘Another torch,’ he says. The flames lick, sway, and behind him there is a cry: ‘Up there!’ He whirls around, a black storm of velvet and fur. The dogs set up a thunderous barking. High above, a shape cuts through the space, swaying. He glimpses the edge of a wing – the outline, against the heights, of a huge bird or bat.

Cowled monks plummet to their knees. A body goes down and a head hits the flags. He calls for more light. Lanterns bob in the nave. The handlers whip back the dogs. ‘Oh, by the thighs of Mary!’ shouts Christophe. High in the roof, thrown across the scaffolding, a stonemason has left his coat. It stretches its arms, as if swimming through the black air.

The fallen man is slapped about the face and levered to the vertical. He is led away, shaking, by two fellow witnesses who will dine out on it for years. There is some uncertain laughter.

‘I suppose that’s not your coat?’ Layton asks the mason.

The man shakes his head. He would cross himself if not encumbered with a chisel in hand. ‘By St Barbara, I swear it moved,’ a monk exclaims.

He says mildly, ‘Masters, as you see, it is but a garment.’

Are these Englishmen? Are these the conquerors of Agincourt? Fear jumps and runs like fleas under the skin. Someone trundles up with a long pole and a short ladder, and prods at the coat as if it were a hanged man subject to indignities by the state. He says to the mason, ‘Master? Will you proceed?’

Three more blows. Each one shuddering its way into the body, making the heart pound. ‘Crowbar,’ he says.

When the lid of the chest moves, a smell creeps out, a stench like a plague pit. It is like a knock with a cudgel. Every man steps back. He has a flask of aqua vitae in his coat. He takes a swig from it and passes it to Christophe. The boy gulps, coughs. ‘I am on fire,’ he says gratefully. ‘Why did you not give me this before?’

‘I am ready,’ the mason says. ‘Assist me, sirs?’

One-two-three: master and man heave the lid aside, upending it on the ground. Dr Layton is at his shoulder. In the shadows the monks trample and snuffle and pray out loud.

Inside the chest there is not enough to make a man. The saint’s ribs are gone, unless ribs are what form this residue; his fingers dust through it. The long bones have been crossed – forearm and shin, thigh bone and the thick bone from the upper arm. They form a square: laid in the centre of it, a skull.

The mason says, ‘Christ alive! Shall I, sir? Or will you?’

‘You,’ he says. ‘Hold up so all can see. If I do it myself they will not believe it. They will think it is a conjuring trick.’

Arm raised aloft, the workman displays the skull. The witnesses gasp. The dogs set up a roar. Their shapes plunge and dart. ‘Down, down!’ their keepers shout. Only the cloth man hangs overhead, serene.

Well, says Dr Layton, either the silver skull is Becket or this one is; no saint is so special he has two heads.

The stench, he notices, is dissipating, or dispersing into a general foulness: the cooling sweat of fear, the fasting breath of early morning. He could swear some monk has pissed himself – or let us say it is one of the brutes running in the nave. He can pick out their shapes now, their muscular bouncing frames, their open jaws and lolling tongues. He turns up the skull between his hands. His fingers explore the calvarium. They emerge through the battered eye sockets. ‘Well – whence comes this second relic?’

If this is Becket’s skull, who is the nameless wretch in the silver cap, kissed more in death than in life, the lips of princesses pressed to his noddle? Did he die of an ague? Did he choke on a plum stone? Did the monks say, ‘Nobody owns this fellow, we’ll make him into a Becket?’ Then bump his cadaver into a yard, and go at it with a hatchet?

He lays the naked skull back in the chest, between the crossed bones. This shrine is as thorough a forgery as you will get, he remarks. We do not even know if these are Becket’s, these thighs, these shins. There could be any number of confused corpses here.

How cold it has grown: as if the year had leapt from leaf-fall to Advent. Dr Layton rubs his hands. ‘Are we done, my lord? I will make a note of everything we have found. I have witnessed with my own eyes.’

The bell rings for the dawn office. When they step out into the air, they can see their breath. The stars fade around them. ‘My lord Cromwell,’ one of the monks says, ‘we have prepared …’

‘Another tomb will not be needed. The king wants the bones.’

The man gapes at him. Only the cloister’s long discipline stops him from crying out in distress. ‘He will not be buried here?’

‘Prise the silver from the skull,’ he says. ‘Have it weighed and list it with the other metal. Put what remains back into the chest, with the other skull, and indeed any more skulls you may turn up; it would not surprise me if that treacherous knave had six heads. I shall take the chest with me today. Give it to Monsieur Christophe here. You need not reseal it.’

The dogs are chained, led away – whining and grumbling, but wagging the stumps of their docked tails. After their night’s work they are hungry for breakfast. As are we all, if we can cough up the poison from our throats. ‘Give me that flask again?’ Christophe says.

He passes it over. ‘Keep it.’ He pulls Christophe close and says in his ear, ‘Get the bones to Austin Friars. If anyone asks where they are, they went on a cart and you never saw them after.’

He thinks, I want to be able to locate the knave at a moment’s notice. The king spits at the name of Becket, but give him a year or two and he may change his mind, and make him a saint again. Sad, but those are the times.

The king has approved new injunctions this month. The Bible is to be read, the people are to learn their Commandments and their Creed, the priest is to teach them, a little and a little every week. ‘But my lord Cromwell,’ the king says, ‘do not make my church strange to the people. Keep those images worthy of reverence. Retain all laudable ceremonies. Do not outrage my subjects with new and alien practices.’

The Germans say, ‘We know you are on our side, Cromwell, no matter your caution.’ Hugh Latimer says, ‘More honest men have been promoted under you, these last five years, than in a hundred years before.’ Thomas Cranmer says, ‘You have given everything for the gospel: you have risked everything, everything you have and are.’ Robert Barnes says, ‘Suppose the king is losing his nerve?’

He feels as if their words are echoing in his head. He walks away. He is very tired: bone-weary, he says to himself. He wonders, where is my daughter Jenneke this morning? He feels as if he is drunk, as if he had emptied the flask himself; and he remembers a day, Putney, the riverbank, long ago, walking home in the dawn: he sees himself as if from the treetops, swaying from side to side, a small striving figure in the white light, with a taste of vomit in his mouth.

October brings Stephen Gardiner: rolling up from Dover with his baggage, aware he returns from France under a cloud. Bess Darrell, listening to the talk in papist houses, is sure that someone within our French embassy had contact with Reginald Pole last year, and told him where to move to avoid the king’s agents. It would be neat to find Stephen was the traitor. The bishop has always been a stout defender of the king’s title of Supreme Head. But those who know him have long believed what he says is different from what he thinks.

It has been good work to keep Gardiner out of England for three years. Now he sets Bonner, who is to succeed him as our envoy, to truffle through Stephen’s files for any trace of those mishaps that occur in a diplomat’s life. Bonner takes to it with relish. To give him rank, he has been promoted Bishop of Hereford, and can hardly believe his luck. His letters from France are gleeful, yet full of rancour and complaint, couched in phrases that make my lord Privy Seal laugh. His predecessor, he reports, was obstructive in the handover, and leaves behind him an embassy guest list that shows how much he enjoyed papist company. And his common table talk was how the king could be reconciled to Rome without losing face: and how he, Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, was the man who would bring it about.

‘Look,’ he says to Rafe: he hands over Bonner’s letter. What caterpillars these men be, who digest all before them, who fatten on the king’s favour, who bite jagged holes in the commonwealth. They cocoon in dusty corners; one day they will split their casing and emerge in gaudy, flaunting their Roman vestments.

Bonner complains of Wyatt too. Wyatt was rude to him when they were in Spain, insufferable when they were in Nice. He was secretive. He was nonchalant when they were in peril. His housekeeping is extravagant: harlots pass in and out of the lodgings of his entourage. And also, Bonner says, Wyatt bears a grudge against the king about his imprisonment two years back, a grudge which he often airs.

He finds that believable. He finds it natural. A petty clerk like Bonner, he will never understand a man like Wyatt, unconstrained in action or speech. I have always been surprised, Richard Riche says, that Wyatt should be an ambassador. He seems to me to come from a former age, when such gallantries as his did not have to pass through the king’s accounts.

Francis Bryan has crawled back to England sick enough to die. The king has kicked him out of the privy chamber, though Bryan swears all his excesses have been in England’s service. His people take him off to the country, and write to Lord Cromwell begging for a kind word. ‘You know you would miss him sorely,’ Richard Cromwell says. ‘Anytime you don’t know what to do, you say, “Arrest Sir Francis Bryan!”’

He has nothing against Francis, personally. It is only out of a sort of affection that he calls him the Vicar of Hell. And it nettles him, that men are applying for his offices even before he is dead. He writes him a letter to encourage him to live, and he asks Dr Layton to send him some of the excellent pears he grows at his rectory at Harrow-on-the-Hill.

Mr Wriothesley, passing through Antwerp, carries a letter to Jenneke. He is unsurprised when he receives no reply: if she perceives a risk she should not take it. He thinks of her; he sees her sitting under the tapestry where her mother is in the weave; he sees her bold and bright on the page, when Anselma is a faded text. Her visit marks her place in the book of his life – a book which falls back into loose leaves. Printers can read as if through a mirror. It is their trade. Their fingers are nimble and their eye keen. But examine any book and you will see that some characters are upside down, some transposed.

November: the feasts of All Souls and All Saints. In the last few days William Fitzwilliam has been six times to the Tower to see Geoffrey Pole. Fitzwilliam has not hurt him, though he has mentioned the possibility of doing so. After the first interrogation, having somehow obtained a blade, the prisoner stabbed himself in the chest.

Nephew Richard goes to see the prisoner. He adds his persuasions to Fitzwilliam’s. Just tell us everything, he says to Geoffrey; it couldn’t be simpler. Open your heart, and throw yourself on the king’s mercy. Do it before my uncle gets here.

Finally he, Lord Cromwell, arrives himself. ‘How is Geoffrey today?’

The gaoler Martin says, ‘Well enough. For a man with a hole in him.’

They had brought in surgeons, who declared it a small hole, and that in a week you would hardly see the mark. They had brought Geoffrey’s wife, Lady Constance. After the visit she left by boat, tear-streaked and panic-stricken, exclaiming that Geoffrey would ruin his whole family. Fitzwilliam said, ‘We should bring Constance before the council, she clearly knows a good deal. But my lord Privy Seal should talk to her first, he always makes progress with the ladies.’

Geoffrey has been cleanly kept these weeks. No one has insulted him, or spoken to him less than deferentially. But since his interrogations began, he has been taken lower, and his chamber smells stale. He has not been eating, his eyes are hollow. Seeing his visitor, he struggles up from his bed. Good manners, or alarm? ‘Cromwell,’ he says.

‘I hear you punctured yourself.’ He shakes his head. ‘Dear God, Geoffrey, what were you thinking? Do you need to lie down again, or can you sit?’

Geoffrey looks at his stool dubiously, as if it might be a trick. Martin assists him to it.

‘Fitzwilliam has been here,’ Geoffrey says. ‘With fifty-nine questions. Who would put fifty-nine questions? Why not sixty, I ask myself. He had a pattern drawn on his paper, and he made to write between the lines. I said to myself, this is some device of Cromwell’s.’

It seems the grid on the paper has filled the prisoner with dread. It makes no more sense to him than a heptagram or other figure drawn by a magician. ‘It’s only to help the clerks,’ he says. He sits down opposite Geoffrey, drawing his coat about him. ‘It helps them record the dates and places and who was present when treason was spoken, or some treasonable act set in train. It is a help to us when the conspiracy is a big one. Especially when many of the wretches are related to each other and have similar names. You remember the Holy Maid? We used a device of that sort, when we questioned her.’

‘The woman Barton? You harp on that still? Barton is hanged.’

It is Geoffrey’s first flash of spirit; his hands tremble on the tabletop.

‘Yes, she is good and dead,’ he says. ‘A poor simple country girl, who would never have thought of treason if the monks at Canterbury had not corrupted her. She forecast the king’s death, and the death of his queen that was then. She foretold my death too. We were all dying and damned, she said – myself, my little nieces, the maid who brought her dinner when she lodged with me, and the spaniel who lay on her feet at night and kept them warm.’

‘You lodged her?’ Geoffrey is shocked. ‘I did not know that. What did you do to her?’

He leans forward. ‘Your family are lucky you were not all hanged with her. You were mired in Barton’s schemes up to your necks, you and the Courtenays both. The king was merciful because he respected your ancient blood. But you know what I think of it. I respect it no more than I do your dung.’ He looks up. ‘Martin, I want two candles please.’

It is a fine afternoon, and though the window is small, there is a wan silver light outside. Geoffrey starts in his skin: ‘Jesu, do not burn me!’

‘Beeswax, Martin,’ he says. ‘A small size.’

Tallow would do, to burn a man. As the thought penetrates, he sees Geoffrey’s shoulders ease. He says, ‘I thought you and I understood each other.’

‘Who can understand you, Cromwell?’

‘I have been feeing you for years. And now I find you have wasted my substance. I paid you to watch your family and yet you appear to know nothing of their dealings. Is it negligence, or lack of capacity, or do you play me false?’ When the man does not answer he says, ‘Call it question sixty.’

Martin brings the candles and a pricket stand. ‘Geoffrey,’ he says, ‘the French merchants have a custom they call the vente à la bougie. Suppose you have something to sell. It may be bales of wool, it may be a book, it may be a castle. All interested parties gather, there is some discussion, perhaps a glass of wine, and then the bidding begins, and lasts while the first candle burns. Martin, will you light one?’

‘I know nothing of this practice,’ Geoffrey says. ‘I have never heard of it.’

‘That is why I am explaining it to you. When the first candle is burned down, the bidding ceases. But then, who wants to make a hasty bargain? Buyer or seller, a man needs thinking time. A second candle is lit. There may be higher bids. When the second candle goes out the deal is done.’

A grating laugh. ‘Do they not know their minds, these merchant friends of yours?’

‘Oh, they are not my friends,’ he says innocently. ‘They are just divers Frenchmen, I don’t know them personally. But I know how it works. The second candle tends to drive the bids up. A man thinks, I have put my best offer on the table … but regret overcomes him, as he sees his chances melt away. He searches his pockets, taps his friends for a loan – he finds that his best offer is far better than he thought. Now, you have offered us a few scant pence. I think you are good for a thousand pounds. Dig into your resources, and find what you have that will persuade me.’

‘What do I get?’ Geoffrey says.

‘Caveat emptor,’ he says. ‘This is the good part. You have to bid blind.’

He has a satchel of paperwork with him. While the candle is wasting and Geoffrey is sweating, he takes out a bundle and lays it on the table. Martin comes in and out with ink and sand and each time the gaoler goes out of the room Geoffrey follows him with his eyes, as if Martin’s presence offered him some protection. ‘Forgive me,’ he says to Geoffrey, ‘if I make use of the time. There is a letter here I must attend to, from Bishop Latimer. He is at Hailes Abbey, finding out one of their frauds. It is what they call the Holy Blood.’

Geoffrey Pole’s hand twitches. At the mention of this very sacred residue, he wants to cross himself. But he does not think it would be wise.

‘Latimer says it’s some sort of gum. But if shown the coins of simple folk, it becomes liquid.’ He returns to Hugh’s letter. ‘Don’t hesitate to interrupt me when you are ready to bid.’

The next paper in his bundle should properly go to Richard Riche at the Court of Augmentations, as it relates to the surrender of the nunnery at Malling. But pinned to it is a note to him, from the abbess in her own hand. She is Margaret Vernon, Gregory’s old tutor: she who so tenderly taught him to write his name and say his Ave. I’m coming to see you, she writes. I’m coming Friday. I can’t travel up from Kent in one day. I’m getting old. I’ll have to stop with you overnight.

‘Martin,’ he says, ‘I feel in my bones that my friend will soon make me an offer. Bring my lord Southampton’s interrogatories. So they are ready to my hand.’

‘Southampton.’ Geoffrey invests it with a sneer. ‘It put him out of countenance, when I called him by his plain name Fitzwilliam.’

‘I understand that. If I were made an earl, I would expect you to address me as one.’

‘You?’ Geoffrey laughs. ‘That were a world where fishes walk.’

‘And trees sing,’ he agrees. ‘I shall put questions now. You will offer answers. I shall see if I can accept them.’

‘You have no proof,’ Pole bursts out. ‘All you allege is words, words, words. But you cannot prove any of them were ever spoken.’

‘I have letters.’

‘My brother burns his letters.’

‘Your brother Montague? I wonder why? A heap of ashes may be eloquent.’

It is now late in the afternoon. He glances through Fitzwilliam’s notes, and allows a silence to blossom. He feels Pole watching him. The first candle is spent and Martin, glancing at him for permission, kindles the second from its stub. ‘This is what they call le dernier feu. While the light lasts, I am accepting bids.’

‘I will not play your game.’

‘It is a serious transaction, I assure you. I am still in the market. Help me fill in the grid. Part of it is done but you will see,’ he holds the paper up, ‘there are spaces. If between us we can complete it, I will offer you your life. It will be on my terms, not yours, but still it will be your life. You may live quiet. Away from the court. I am not a hard man. You will have a competence. Enough to live as a gentleman.’

Let Pole wrestle with that. He picks up Margaret Vernon’s letter. She wishes to strike a bargain. Let me sell off one of the abbey manors, I’ll pay the sisters their pensions out of it yearly, and settle up with the servants. What’s left will be my portion for life. Enough for a woman on her own. I know people who will give me a home.

He thinks, I do not seem able to help women. Dorothea. My daughter. Lady Rochford. They present me with their pain and longing. They tell me they are lost and confused and fatherless and out of hope. I give them money. Or in the case of the king’s daughter, a horse, a jewel, a piece of advice.

The sun has slid away. Le dernier feu burns orange. ‘Speak to me, Geoffrey. When the last fire is done we will be in the dark. Then I will break your legs. And that will be just the start of it.’

Pole leaps up from his stool. A jolt rocks the table and the draught he makes causes the flame to buckle. He, the Lord Privy Seal, reaches out, closes a hand round the candlestick; it is a cheap thing, tarnished pewter. ‘Steady!’ he says. ‘Do not shorten your time. You may still trade. No? Then will you fetch the frame, Martin?’

‘The frame?’ Geoffrey says. ‘What is that?’

‘It is a sort of vice, in which we clamp the limb to be broken.’

Martin, uncertain, does not move. ‘I am sure, sir,’ he says to Pole, ‘you would not want my lord to go to that trouble.’

‘Observe the candle,’ he suggests.

‘Mother Mary protect me,’ Pole says.

‘She will not.’ His tone is bored. Outside the moon is rising. His mind keeps straying back to Margaret and her letter. ‘Do you know,’ he says to Geoffrey, ‘I’m weary of this. Fetch the mallets as well, Martin.’

He settles back to his papers. What Margaret Vernon asks is unusual but not unreasonable. Her terms are precise – she is a woman who knows some law – and her figures look sound at first glance. Geoffrey on his stool is trying to make himself narrow. His shoulders are drawn up, his eyes closed. If you laid your hand on him you would feel every pulse in his body jumping.

Martin comes in. ‘Is this what you require, sir? The frame is on its way.’

He had imagined a wooden-headed mallet, short-handled, for tapping in the wedges to hold the limb rigid. What Martin has brought is another kind of instrument, a weapon not a tool, with a handle three foot long. ‘That would smash the head of a Scot,’ he says admiringly. He stands up and takes it from Martin. ‘Just the one? It will do for now.’

The weapon’s head is solid and cold against his palm. He tests the weight of the whole, holding it away from him, at a right angle to the stone flags. Then he drops his arm and swings the hammer, experimentally. He likes the sensation. The pleasant sway of the body; the moment of balance, control, then the growing impulsion, the motion from the heels up. It takes you beyond yourself, into a pleasant giddiness, such as you might feel with a woman: a lightness, when you reach the point of no return.

The noise when the hammer hits the wall is enough to wake the dead. It knocks Geoffrey’s stool from under him, jerks him to his feet. ‘Jesus!’

While the light is still quivering, while their ears are still ringing, he says, ‘We can start without the frames. Perhaps they are in use elsewhere. Martin, will you gather up those papers? They are the king’s affairs, and I would not want blood on them.’ With his right hand he grips the hammer and with his left he pinches out the candle.

Later, outside, Martin leans against the wall, shaky. ‘You said, fetch the frame. I thought, Mother Mary, what does he mean, I don’t know any frame.’

‘There are such things. I have seen them. Not here. In other prisons.’

‘I can imagine them,’ Martin says.

‘So could Geoffrey.’

In the room behind them the prisoner weeps. There is no damage, not even a scrape to his shins. ‘But would you do it?’ Martin says.

There is little light: only one torch burning in its bracket. Somewhere a drip of water, actively corroding stone. It is the smell of these places that is the worst, the enclosed, stale air, the metallic tang of fresh blood, the sour reek of piss. ‘I mean,’ Martin says, ‘could you smash a man’s limbs, then go home to your supper and your family?’

‘I haven’t a family.’

‘No,’ Martin says. ‘Begging your pardon. I know you haven’t.’

‘Although,’ he says, remembering, ‘I am a grandfather now.’

‘I’ve seen people hung up,’ Martin says.

‘Sooner or later, you see everything.’ He feels a weight in his chest; it is dull, the shape of the hammer head. He wishes he were back in time, before Geoffrey started to talk. He wants to swing the hammer again. The head was large and it diffused the impact, so it barely jarred.

‘When they’re hung by their wrists their own weight does it,’ Martin says. ‘You might say, they torment themselves.’

The manacles get you a result within twenty minutes. The cold sweat starts out of the man as if from a faucet. If you’re short of time you can hang weights on his feet. You’re across the room, your pen poised, when he breaks; no point being awash in other people’s body fluids. Once you’ve taken down the first, virgin words of his confession, words that are green and sweet, the gaolers come and swab the snot, the tears, the loose stools that creep down his legs.

‘There is a rack.’ Martin indicates with his head. ‘It is used. I’ve been in earshot.’

It is a nice question. Do you let the fellow scream? Some men who are used to the work say it is the prisoner’s own wails that drive up the terror and make him speak. Others feel it’s not worthwhile, for it agitates those who overhear; there are always clerks on hand, or gentlemen councillors, who may be sickened by the racket. In these cases, some means may be used, short of suffocating the prisoner, to stifle the noise. He says, ‘The Spanish, when they burn what they call a heretic, they parade the poor soul through the streets. They sheet him in white, and shave his head and sometimes his eyebrows, so that he looks more like a puppet than a human.They put a taper in his hand, as if he were lighting the fire for himself. They promenade him across the cobbles with his feet bleeding and papers pinned to him proclaiming his heresy, and the monks process behind him with their silver crosses and their psalms. And the people line the streets to see it, the market squares. But when the whole city has viewed the spectacle, they burn him in private in some prison yard, with a gag in his mouth.’

‘You have been in Spain, sir?’

‘No, but Thomas Wyatt has told me, and when Wyatt tells you, it is as good as witnessing.’

Martin looks respectful. ‘If your lordship recalls, I had the privilege to serve Master Wyatt when he was last in ward. Generous and open-handed.’

‘Generous to a fault,’ he says. ‘Look, do not let Geoffrey injure himself again. Turn his clothes inside out and make sure he has not so much as a pin. He will give us no trouble now. The king will not inflict pains on any man from a noble house. I cannot think it has ever been done, not in his reign. But can they rely on that? The king has done a number of things that have never been done before.’

‘He has not done the dungeon work,’ Martin says.

Or mopped the floor afterwards. Or, on the execution ground, shaken adherent flesh from chains. He asks, ‘What persuaded you into this trade?’

‘A man must get a living.’

‘You could have been an honest farmer.’

‘And kill pigs?’

Sow seed, that’s what he was thinking. Harvest the grain. There is a pure, clean world, where men subsist on milk and apples, and bread so white and soft it is like eating light. He says, ‘William Fitzwilliam is on his way. And Richard Riche, and Richard my nephew. Now Geoffrey is babbling, they will be able to fill in the grid. And we can do as we like hereafter with his kin. A good day’s work, I call it.’ And all from smashing a mallet against a wall. ‘When they’re done, take Geoffrey upstairs. Give him his supper, if he can eat it. Cut up his meat for him.’

Martin looks chastened. ‘When we took his knife away, he threatened to hang himself from a beam.’

‘I am not afraid of that.’ It would take a resolution he doubts Geoffrey could summon. ‘Still, if he does, it is no great matter. Though it must be clear it is by his own hand.’

‘Do you want me to give him a rope?’

‘I wouldn’t go that far.’

Soon reinforcements arrive, with a brace of clerks carrying ink-horn and paper. ‘You boys stay out in the fresh air,’ he tells the clerks. ‘Or do you follow Martin here, he will get you some ale. Richard Riche will write for us, won’t you? I have another sixty-two questions for Geoffrey. If we get tired we’ll whistle for you.’

The clerks look grateful. He watches them out of the passage and waits till they mount the twisting stair. He says, ‘Geoffrey will talk around the point. He will blizzard you with “I swear it was October but it could have been March,” and “I believe it was in Sussex or else it was in Yorkshire,” and “It might have been my mother or it might have been the Wife of Bath.” Nail him down on threats to the king himself – threatening his councillors, that is no news, we know his brother Montague hates us. Chapuys is one of the chief doers in their plots, and that is no news either. But I think the King of France is deeper in this than a brother monarch should be.’

‘If François invaded,’ Richard Cromwell says, ‘I believe he would put the King of Scots on our throne.’

‘Yes. But Exeter’s people don’t know that. Or the Poles. They have such pride of their persons. They think they will all be kings.’

‘I fear we lack proof against Exeter,’ Fitzwilliam says. ‘He is a cautious man, he destroys his traces. Geoffrey will give us enough on his own family, but –’

‘But it will stretch,’ Riche says. ‘They are known confederates, the two houses.’

‘You recall I have a woman with the Courtenays,’ he says.

Riche says, ‘What, some laundrymaid?’

Fitz laughs: ‘Leave Cromwell to his devices.’

Riche says, ‘I do not see how the Lady Mary can be left out of it this time. Surely, if they were planning to make use of her, she cannot be ignorant of that?’

‘That were great pity,’ Fitzwilliam says. ‘To see a princess destroyed, on suspicion.’

He says, ‘They abuse her trust. She would never strike down her own father.’

‘We have been here before,’ Riche says. ‘You are too lenient. You do not see her nature, sir.’

‘What did you do to Geoffrey?’ Fitzwilliam asks.

He bundles his papers under his arm. They are strung with twine, Margaret Vernon’s note with the rest. He had run her figures in his head, while Pole was confessing. ‘I made a noise,’ he says.

He thinks, I took up residence in the pit of his stomach. What do I ever do?

A week on, he will hear what the people of London are saying: that Gregory Pole was tortured at the Tower: that he was strapped to a grid, and it was heated, so he was grilled like St Lawrence the martyr. That Thomas Cromwell did it all.

He is shocked when he sees Margaret Vernon. It is disconcerting to see her dressed like a burgess’s wife, although he himself has recommended nuns lay aside their habits. Fashion is shifting. Women are showing their hair again. Margaret’s is silver. He asks her, ‘What colour was it before?’

‘No especial colour. Mouse.’

They are at Austin Friars in the parlour. She has been waiting for him. He feels he should have changed his own clothes. He feels there might be blood on them, though no blood has been shed at the Tower. Geoffrey has admitted he planned to go abroad, with a band of men to join his brother Reginald. He speaks of confederacies in closets and in garden arbours, plots over supper and after Mass. He reports dubious talk overheard: from Thomas More’s family, from Bishop Stokesley. The ripples spread wider, wider with each whispered phrase. Signing off his statement for the day, he begs the king’s mercy. At the foot of the page he scribbles, Geoffrey Pole your humble slave.

Margaret says, ‘You are stouter, Thomas. You look as if you don’t get any fresh air.’

‘Sometimes I try to get out with my falcons,’ he says. ‘But the king might call me back at any time. The Venetians, you know, they draw a line on their ships to see that they don’t overload them. I have no load line. Or none that the king can see.’

‘You don’t have enough help? All these boys …’

He thinks, no one can help. It’s just Henry and Cromwell, Cromwell and Henry. ‘Once I took Michaelmas Day off, because it is a lawyers’ holiday, but the king objected. His reasoning is, he doesn’t get a day off, every day he has to rule. I say, but Majesty, you are divinely anointed, you are granted a special grace that means you are never tired. He says, it’s thirty years since I was crowned. It must have run out.’

‘You ought to have a wife.’

‘Well, get me one. If you know a comfortable woman, send her my way. I do not want for fortune so she need not bring a penny, she needs no great wit and she need not be young. All I stipulate is that she not be a papist, and subvert my household.’

Margaret laughs. ‘What a pity, because soon there will be a pack of young women turned out of their cloister, but I fear some of them cleave to Rome. Not I. I took my oath to the king and meant it.’

He says, ‘I think the king will not allow a woman to marry, if she has been a nun. Not if she was sworn and professed.’

‘So where would he have my sisters live? Southwark, in the stews?’

He wants to beg her, don’t be angry. Angry people fill my life. ‘You should go and see Gregory. If you want a home, he would welcome you. I am sure he would be pleased for you to teach his son as you taught him.’

She shakes her head. ‘I shall set up housekeeping with some of my sisters. We shall be unruly women, with no master.’

‘You will give scandal,’ he says.

‘We are too old for it. Folk will pity us, and leave apples on our doorstep. They will come to us for poultices and lucky charms. All the same,’ her face softens, ‘I should like to see my little boy.’

‘My wife – Elizabeth – she used to be jealous of you.’

Margaret says calmly, ‘There was no need.’

He thinks, if it could be held that Katherine of Aragon was no wife, if it could be held that Anne Boleyn was no wife, might it not be discovered that Margaret Vernon was no nun? Could we not find an error in the paperwork? Then she would be free.

But what’s the point? he thinks. She would die and leave me. Or I would die and leave her. It’s not worth it. Nobody’s worth it.

In the first week of November he arrests Lord Montague and the Marquis of Exeter. He detains Constance, Geoffrey’s wife, and Gertrude, the marchioness, and some other of the king’s old friends. He sends Fitzwilliam down to Margaret Pole at her castle in Sussex. Keep at it, he says: question her day and night if you have to.

But Fitz gets nothing from the countess. Her answers, he says, are earnest, vehement and precise. She denies any wrongdoing or intent to do wrong. When Fitzwilliam calls her son Reginald an ingrate bastard, she says, not a bastard, no: I was ever true to my lord husband, I was a wife beyond reproach.

She admits that when she knew Reginald had evaded harm, she expressed relief: she is his mother, after all. Yes, she knows that he despises her for keeping faith with the Tudors. Does she know he has said he will tread her under his feet? She purses her lips. ‘I know, and must abide it.’

Fitzwilliam tells Margaret Pole to pack her bags. He means to bring her on a litter to his own house at Cowdray. When he tells her that her household goods are to be inventoried, she knows her long run of good fortune is over; the wheel has turned, and she is going down. For the first time, Fitz says, dismay shows on her face. But that is nothing to the dismay on the face of Lady Fitzwilliam, when he tells her the Countess of Salisbury will be living with them, for how long no one knows.

He himself, at the Tower, questions Margaret’s eldest son. Detached, disdainful, Montague often declines to reply. ‘My lord, witnesses have heard you say you never liked the king, not from boyhood.’

Montague shrugs: as if to say, that is my privilege.

‘False reports have come out of your household, that parish churches are to be pulled down. You know there is no rumour more calculated to bring simple people out under arms. Why did you not intervene?’

‘It is hard to stop rumours,’ Montague says. ‘If you can do it, let me know your method. I assure you, it was not I who started them.’

‘Did you say …’ he consults his papers, ‘… that the king killed his first wife by unkindness? That he next married a harlot? That he bred a bastard?’

‘Women’s things.’

‘Did you say the Turk is a better Christian than the king?’

‘Did Geoffrey tell you that?’ Montague laughs.

He presses on: has Montague conferred with Lord Exeter, as to how many men they can raise between them? Has he said it is not enough to kill the king’s councillors, one must also aim at their head? And is this not plain treason?

‘I suppose it would be,’ Montague says.

He goes to the Marquis of Exeter. He has fewer cards in his hand, and Exeter knows it. But both the Poles and the Courtenays, in recent years, have dismissed any servants they suspected of favouring the new learning, or of Bible reading. They have dug, therefore, a deep well of resentment on which he may draw. It takes just a little time to fetch up the bucket.

He says, ‘Lord Exeter, you have been in company where the king has been called a beast.’

Exeter sighs. ‘Is this the best poor Geoffrey can do?’

‘You have said, the king and Cromwell are alike, they disdain the whole realm to get what they want.’

Exeter rolls his eyes.

‘Have you not said, “All the king’s pretensed authority cannot cure his sore leg”? Have you not said, “His leg will kill him one day”? Have you not said, “When Henry dies, then goodnight Master Cromwell”?’

Exeter makes no reply.

‘Have you not said, “We may have a prince but he will soon be dead, the whole Tudor line is accursed”?’

Exeter bridles: ‘I do not deal in curses.’

‘No,’ he says. ‘Women’s things. Perhaps your wife does?’

Richard Cromwell steps in. Has Lord Exeter not taken abbey lands?

Yes.

Accepted them of his own free will?

Yes.

Excused himself, saying God will forgive him, as they will all be restored to the monks one day?

Silence.

‘How could that be?’ Richard asks.

‘By a reversal of policy,’ Exeter says. ‘The king might repent.’

‘Or join again with Rome?’

‘You cannot rule it out.’

He smashes his hand down on the table. ‘Believe me, I can.’

He talks to Gertrude, Exeter’s wife. She is the man of the household, a bold and enterprising woman, constantly seeking to advance the family she has married into. Her stepmother was Spanish, one of Katherine’s ladies; no wonder she is drawn, he observes, to the company of the Emperor’s ambassador, Chapuys. No wonder they confide in each other.

It is hard to abash Gertrude. He has let her go free before, so she thinks he is soft-hearted. ‘I beg the king to stay his hand,’ he tells her. ‘God knows, my lady, he has been merciful in your case. Myself, I always hope folk will amend.’ He looks at her, sorrowful. ‘I am often disappointed.’

He walks out. Says to his people, ‘We must lay hold of the child. I mean, Exeter’s son.’

They stare at him. He says, ‘When have you known the king harm a child? But all the same, fetch him.’

Richard Cromwell says, ‘We cannot risk Exeter’s heir being taken out of the country, to gather supporters abroad.’

‘And bring in Montague’s son too,’ he says. ‘Henry Pole is of like age.’

It is a cataclysm. They are down, the great families, falling like skittles when a giant bowls; swept from the shelves like jugs in an earthquake.

Bess Darrell is brought to the Tower. No one raises an eyebrow over it, since all Gertrude’s women are questioned. Bess is her angel self: her golden hair, her eyes of cornflower blue. She gives him facts on paper, letters she has copied. She gives him samples of treason embroidered: the pansy for Pole, the marigold for Mary. But when he has done with her she asks, ‘What now? Must I go back and live amongst these people? What shall I say, when they ask me what I told Cromwell?’

‘Say you told me your dreams.’

They set great store by dreams, these families. They are always writing them down under seal and sending them to each other by fast courier. Many nights, it seems, they dream the king is dead. Sometimes they dream Jane Seymour comes in her shroud, to tell the king she hates him and he is damned.

He says, ‘You cannot go back among the Courtenays because they will not exist. When you leave here you will go to Allington.’

She looks up. ‘And what will I do there?’

‘Live and make no stir.’

‘You will bring Wyatt home?’

He nods. ‘Though I cannot say when.’

‘They say the king is not satisfied with him.’

‘He is not satisfied with any of us.’

He thinks, we do not even know that Wyatt is still alive. But I trust his skill in locating his peril and moving away from it. Or not, if stasis is best: Wyatt stood while a lioness stalked him.

Bess Darrell says, ‘Lord Montague calls England a prison. He says it has been a prison these last six years.’

‘Too kind a gaol for him to leave,’ he says. ‘They sicken me. They are cowards. If he had flown across the sea to Reginald, at least I would respect him. He would have shown himself a man, to be taken under arms.’

‘It would have made your task easier,’ Bess says. ‘No doubt of their treason then. But apart from what I have supplied, you have nothing but Geoffrey’s nonsense, and hearsay and rumour and kitchen boys’ gossip. They will not oblige you, Montague and Exeter, unless you rip their treason out of them, and you cannot do that.’

‘I am very ingenious,’ he says sadly. ‘And your testimony is a great help.’

‘But think, my lord. If you call a traitor everyone who has voiced a dislike of the king or his proceedings, who does that leave alive?’

‘Me,’ he says. Henry and Cromwell. Cromwell and Henry.

‘Exeter thinks the world will turn,’ Bess says. ‘He knows Henry is afraid of excommunication. He thinks a show of force will bring him back to Rome.’

‘He will not turn,’ he says. ‘Too much has been said and done in England. The king cannot resist change even if he would. Let me live another year or two, and I will make sure what we have done can never be undone, not by any power on earth. And even if Henry does turn, I will not turn. I will make good my cause in my own person. I am not too old to take a sword in my hand.’

‘You would take arms against Henry?’ She seems entertained, more than shocked.

‘I did not say that.’

She looks down at her hands, wearing Wyatt’s ring. ‘Oh, I think you did.’

Mid-November: with the first foul weather, you may witness a Cambridge man, a priest, committing a slow public suicide. One man, taking on the king: one puny challenger against the giant, his person small as a crumb, his weapons straw.

His name is John Lambert, though he was born Nicholson. He was ordained priest, and knew Little Bilney, who converted him to the gospel. He went to Antwerp, chaplain to the English merchants; his path crossed every dangerous path, Tyndale’s included. Thomas More, he says, tricked him back to England. Then old Archbishop Warham – Canterbury, that was – hauled him up for heresy, charging him in forty-five articles, which he rebutted. Yes, he admitted, he had studied Luther’s work, and he found himself the better man for it. He agreed with Luther that it was lawful for a priest to marry. The question of free will, he called too hard a matter for a simple man. But he believed only Christ, not priests, could forgive sin. Scripture has all we need, he said. We do not need the extra rules Rome has made up.

In the middle of the hearing, Warham died. The case was allowed to lapse. But the passage of four, five years has not made Lambert cautious. At Austin Friars – no clerks present, no record kept – Thomas Cranmer has reasoned with him. He, Thomas Cromwell, has argued with him fiercely. And Robert Barnes has stood by, his face pinched with dislike and fear: bursting out at last, ‘You – whatever you call yourself – Lambert, Nicholson – you will ruin us all.’

Cranmer had said, ‘We do not quarrel with your views –’

‘Yes, we do,’ Barnes said.

‘Well then, we do – but the chief thing is, be circumspect. Be patient.’

‘What, wait till you crawl in my direction? Play the man, Cranmer, stand up for the truth. You know it now, in your heart.’

Barnes says, ‘Lambert, you question baptism itself –’

‘There is baptism in the scriptures. But not of infants.’

‘– and you question the eucharist, the sacrament of the altar. Now, if you do that, if you do it openly, I cannot protect you and I will not, and he,’ he points to the archbishop, ‘will not, and he,’ – he points to the Lord Privy Seal – ‘he will not either.’

‘I tell you what I will do,’ Lambert says. ‘I will spare you torment. I will go over your heads. I will put my case to the king himself. He is head of the church. Let Henry judge me.’

The king – let no man be astonished – has risen to the challenge. At Whitehall he will debate with Lambert in public. ‘Cromwell, are the ambassadors coming?’

Europe calls the king a heretic – so now let Europe see and hear him defend our common faith. Pole asserts he is inferior in learning to men like More and Fisher, the blessed dead. He will show the contrary. Rows of benches are set out for the spectators.

‘Pray God the king does not get a fall,’ Rafe Sadler says. ‘Lambert is a student of languages. He can cite the scriptures in tongues ancient and modern.’

He is rueful. ‘I always told the king, English is enough.’

He thinks, for every point Lambert scores, I will smart.

He has done his best to deter Henry from putting on this show. He does not need to answer Lambert, he tells him – he has bishops to take care of it. But Henry is not listening. It is only the day before the debate that he senses the discomfort of his advisers. ‘What, do you fear for me? I am well able for any heretic. And I must carry the torch of faith high, where my friends and enemies can see it.’

He says, and when will your Majesty begin to carry it? ‘About noon,’ Henry says. ‘And by twilight we should be done.’

Early on the morning of the hearing, he receives Lisle’s wife, over from Calais. There is no one, other than Stephen Gardiner, whom he would less like to see before breakfast.

He knows Lady Lisle dislikes him. She dislikes what he is – a jack-in-office – and makes him feel that his manner, his address, gives him away as a pot-boy. All the same, she chatters gaily about the terms on which she will sell him her Gloucestershire property. You would think all was merry in Calais; she does not mention the stream of disaffected informants who roll up to his various houses, some of them still green from the sea-crossing. She does not mention the folk in custody at the Tower, though surely they are cousins of hers; all these people are related. Only she says, ‘I hear you are busy, Lord Cromwell. Never too busy to get land, are you? I said to my husband, depend upon it, Cromwell will make time for me. He wants what I have.’

‘How is my lord Lisle? John Husee says he is melancholy.’

‘It would cheer him to have reward for long service.’

‘The king has offered him two hundred pounds a year.’

‘I would it were four hundred.’

He suppresses a smile. ‘I will ask. I promise nothing.’

‘If the king speeds well with the heretic, he will be in a giving humour come this evening. Well,’ she gets up, ‘I must speed away myself. The sooner I am back in Calais, the better my lord will like it. He says he would rather lose a hundred pounds than spend a week without me.’

‘If he had it to lose,’ he says, before he thinks.

‘That’s up to you,’ she says. ‘Try and work it, won’t you, Master Cromwell?’ She laughs, excuses herself. ‘My lord, I should say.’

‘Yes, you should,’ he says. ‘You should know by now.’

‘I mean no slight. What the king has made you, that thing you are. But do you wonder my lord is miserable? So many nobodies are enriched, while we must scrape.’

Lady Lisle cannot get women to serve her, she is so demanding. But old Lisle is in love with her, he thinks: his hard, bright, selfish bride.

It is gone ten o’clock. At Westminster the bishops are waiting: the members of the king’s council, the gentlemen of the privy chamber, the mayor, the aldermen, officers of the London guilds. Christophe helps him into his coat. ‘Bishop Gardineur will be with you,’ he reminds him. ‘Today he will enjoy himself, for surely this poor Lambert will burn? For who can deny baptism? Before St Christophe was baptised, he was a dog’s-head cannibal. His name was not Christophe, but Abominable. After he was baptised he was human, and could pray. Before, he could only bark.’

He says, ‘I know your name is not really Christophe. You had another. Fabrice, was it not?’

‘Christophe was my Calais name. On Calkwell Street. Before Fabrice I was Benoît, a very good little boy. But it does not matter what I was christened. I have forgot.’

He thinks, it is not baptism that will undo Lambert, it is corpus Christi, it is the body of Christ.

Stephen Gardiner, sweeping in: he checks his pace, they halt, they square up; they do off their hats to each other, respectful men, elaborately polite. But with Stephen, politeness only ever lasts a blink.

‘I don’t know what you have been doing in my absence,’ Stephen says. ‘I don’t know why you would tolerate an anabaptist. Unless of course you are one.’

In fantasy, he takes off his coat again. He rolls up his sleeves, and punches Stephen on the nose. It is dismaying to him, that Stephen has been gone three years, and his urge to knock him down is as strong as ever.

‘Is it likely?’ he says. ‘These people you call anabaptists will take no oaths. They will serve no kings. Not only do they deny the commonwealth their labour, the magistrate their obedience, but they deny the child his book. They love ignorance. They say we live in the last days, so why learn anything? Why tend crops, why store grain: there is no need of a harvest.’

‘Oh well,’ Gardiner says, ‘one sees their point, if Christ’s coming is imminent. Which I do not believe. But I thought you might.’

‘You know I have nothing to do with this sect.’

‘Perhaps not.’ Stephen smiles. ‘After all, you take conspicuous thought for the morrow. You lay up treasure on earth, don’t you? Indeed you do little else.’

‘Now you are back in the jurisdiction,’ he says, ‘you will see what I do.’

At midday the king comes in, announced by trumpets. The day is dark but Henry is wearing white from head to foot. He looks like a mountain that one hears of in fables, made of solid ice.

The king takes his place on the dais beneath his canopy of estate. The tiered benches are packed. The clergy sit at the king’s right hand, his noblemen on his left. The hall is hung in splendour, a blur of pennants and flags, and tapestry has been brought from the Wardrobe, so that giant Bible figures preside over the scene: Daniel, Job, Solomon without Sheba.

He, the Vicegerent, takes his seat. Bishop Tunstall gives him a courteous nod. Bishop Stokesley glares. Dr Barnes appears like a graven image. Cranmer seems to have shrunk. Hugh Latimer keeps leaping up and down, running to this one and that, tapping shoulders, whispering, passing notes. He says to Cranmer, ‘Has Hugh briefed the king?’

‘We have all briefed him.’ Cranmer seems surprised. ‘Have not you?’

‘I would not presume. He is closer to God than I am.’

When they bring John Lambert in, his step is firm, his face resolute. But as he looks around him, takes in the grandeur of the hall, you can see he is overwhelmed. He stares at the king, at his shining slopes, and then begins an obeisance – he does not know whether to bow or kneel.

He, Thomas Cromwell, sees Dr Barnes smile. He hears Stokesley shift on his bench, a smug rustle. He swings around and glares: ‘A little charity?’

‘Hush,’ Cranmer says.

They have built a platform so Lambert can be seen from all parts of the hall. He stops before it, like a horse that has seen a shadow in the trees. Urged to mount the steps, he creeps up as if it were a scaffold. He faces the king. His head turns, seeking faces he knows, but when he finds them, in the dim light of noon, he finds them stony.

Henry leans forward. This hearing has no precedent, therefore no rules, but the king has decided to run it like a courtroom. ‘Your name?’

John Lambert is used to defending himself in small rooms. He is courageous, but he is not a man who has ever had to rise to an occasion: and here is his king, the maker of occasions.

His voice seems faint, as if it is coming from another era. ‘I was born John Nicholson. But I am known as John Lambert.’

‘What?’ The king is shocked. ‘You have two names?’

Lambert recoils. He sinks onto one knee.

Gardiner murmurs, ‘Wise move, fellow.’

The king says, ‘I would not trust a man with two names, even if he were my own brother.’

Lambert is taken aback by the king’s plain speaking. Did he expect a learned oration? That is to come: but Henry moves, unerringly, to the ground of their quarrel. ‘The body of Christ. Is it present in the sacrament?’

When the king says corpus Christi, he puts his hand to his hat, in reverence.

Lambert observes the gesture. His shoulders hunch. ‘Your Majesty being so well-learned, a prince of rare sagacity –’

‘Lambert, Nicholson,’ the king says, ‘I did not come here to be flattered. Just answer.’

‘St Augustine says …’

‘I know about Augustine. I want to hear from you.’

Lambert flinches. He is kneeling now and he does not know at what point he can stand up. It is a form of torture he has devised for himself. The king glares at him. ‘Well? What do you say? Is it Christ’s flesh, His blood?’

‘No,’ Lambert says.

Stephen Gardiner slaps his knee, lightly. Bishop Stokesley says, ‘May as well set fire to him now. Why drag it out?’

The king’s face flushes. ‘What about women, Lambert – is it lawful for a woman to teach?’

‘In case of necessity,’ Lambert says. The bishops groan.

And the word ‘minister’, the king demands, what does he take to be its meaning? The word ‘church’? The word ‘penance’? Should the faithful make private confession? Does he think priests may marry?

‘Yes,’ Lambert says. ‘Any man should, if he has not the gift of chastity. St Paul is clear in the matter.’

Robert Barnes says, excuse me. He gets up, blundering over the feet of the learned divines.

‘My lord archbishop,’ the king says, ‘will you stand up now, and show Lambert or Nicholson why he is wrong?’

Cranmer rises. Cuthbert Tunstall leans forward: ‘My lord Cromwell, why does Lambert have two names? It seems to trouble the king as much as his heresies.’

‘I believe he changed it to evade persecution.’

‘Hmm.’ Tunstall sits back. ‘He had better have changed his views.’

Cranmer is on his feet. His manner is tentative: ‘Brother Lambert …’

The people at the back shout they cannot hear.

Robert Barnes has returned. Excuse me, lords, pardon me: blundering over their feet again. He looks sick. Perhaps he has been. Cranmer says, ‘Brother Lambert, I am going to show you some passages in scripture which I believe prove you wrong, and if you admit my texts well-founded, then I think you must concede to my opinion and the king’s. But if –’

Stephen Gardiner is shifting in his seat. While Cranmer makes his case he keeps up a buzz of commentary, no doubt too low for the king to hear. Bishop Shaxton shushes him. Hugh Latimer glares at him. Stephen ignores them, and even before Cranmer has finished he is on his feet.

Cuthbert Tunstall says, ‘My lord of Winchester, I believe I am listed to speak next?’

Gardiner bares his teeth.

Tunstall looks about for help. ‘Gentlemen?’

Cranmer slumps in his chair. Hugh Latimer says, ‘Perhaps the Vicegerent is next?’

He, Cromwell, holds up a palm: not I.

Bishop Shaxton is waving the list. ‘You are number six, Gardiner. Sit down!’

The Bishop of Winchester takes no notice at all. He just carries on, talking a man to death, tripping him and goading him into the flames where he will scream and bleed.

Two o’clock. The king is magisterial. He is nimble, he is trenchant; he is, at times, humble. He does not want to kill Lambert, that is of no interest to him. He wants to out-reason him: so that in the end, Lambert will crumple and confess: ‘Sire, you are the better theologian: I am instructed, enlightened and saved by you.’

You would not hear François engage with a subject in close debate, nor would he be capable of it. You would not find the Emperor fighting to save the life of a miserable subject. They would bring in their Inquisitors, and break Lambert in the torture room.

He, Cromwell, thinks of the tournament, the score sheet, the record of each atteint: broken on the body. Each time the king collects his horse and couches his lance, he pauses, makes Lambert some kind of offer. A prospect of mercy. Your life – if you withdraw, concede, and then beg. Asked if he believes in Purgatory, Lambert says, ‘I believe in tribulation. One may go through Purgatory in this world.’

‘It is a trick,’ Hugh Latimer mutters. ‘The king does not believe in Purgatory himself.’

‘Well, not today,’ Gardiner says.

Three o’clock: piss break. Origen cited, St Jerome, Chrysostom, the prophet Isaiah. Outside, Gardiner says, ‘I cannot think why the old charges against Lambert were ever dropped. A change of archbishop is no excuse. You should have been on top of that, Cromwell.’

Stokesley says, ‘You don’t seem to be taking much interest in the case, my lord Privy Seal.’

‘I wonder why,’ Gardiner says. He spies Latimer. ‘What about you, are you profiting from the king’s learning?’

Hugh growls like a terrier before a bull.

It takes some time for all the spectators to file to their places, to cease coughing and settle. Then all eyes turn to him, the king’s Vicegerent. He lurches to his feet. ‘Majesty, having heard your reasoning, and that of the bishops, I have nothing to add, and I do not think anything is wanting.’

‘What?’ Gardiner says behind him. ‘Nothing is wanting? Go on, Cromwell, reason on the case. You think no one wants to hear you? I want to hear you.’

The king glares. Gardiner throws up his hands, as if in apology.

It is Lambert’s turn to speak. And turns are observed – except by Stephen. Lambert has negotiated himself from his knees to his feet, but four hours have gone by and nobody has offered him a chair. Twilight: his shoulders sag. The torches come in. As their light plays over the faces of the bishops, the king says, ‘It is time, Lambert. You have heard all these learned men. So now, what do you think? Have we persuaded you? Will you live or die?’

Lambert says, ‘I commend my soul into God’s hands. My body, into your Majesty’s. I submit to your judgement. I rest in your clemency.’

Don’t, he thinks. Not there.

Henry says, ‘You hold the sacrament of the altar to be a puppet show.’

‘No,’ Lambert says.

The king holds up a hand. ‘You say it is an illusion. That it is an image only, or figure. You are confounded by one text, the words of Jesus: Hoc est corpus meum. It is the plainest text of all. I will not be a patron to heretics. My lord Cromwell, read the sentence against this man.’

He picks up the documents. In such cases they are prepared in advance. Stokesley says he alone has burned fifty heretics, and even if he is just bragging, there is a form for the next part of the procedure that is well-rehearsed. He stands.

‘Give it good and loud,’ Stokesley says. ‘Let us hear you at last, my lord Cromwell. Leave the wretch in no doubt as to his fate.’

After the edict is read, the guards take Lambert out. The king inclines his head to his audience, with the sober piety of a churchman: which, for this afternoon, he has been. When he lifts his chin, his expression is exalted.

At a signal, the trumpeters step into the hall. They blow a fanfare to see the king out. Six trumpeters. Sixteen pence each. Eight shillings for the treasury to find. The king is thinking of forming a new guard, called the Gentlemen Spears, with new livery. The way he’s going, he’ll want trumpeters every hour.

Barely six o’clock, but black night outside. The winter has taken its iron grip. ‘That was grim,’ Rafe says.

He agrees. ‘Poor fellow.’

Rafe says, ‘I did not mean Lambert. He brought it on himself.’

‘I believe Gardiner brought it on him.’ He is angry. ‘He sets his claws back on English soil and this occurs. I think he has been to the king behind my back. I think he has been pulling at his sleeve – telling him how the French are disgusted at our reformation, how the Emperor is appalled – how he must prove himself a good Roman at heart. As if his great cause is some silly quarrel that can be patched within a fortnight, and seven years’ work dismissed –’

‘It is too late now for a speech,’ Rafe says.

His household guard is here, ready to take him home. The crowds are dispersing. The fanfares are done, the trumpeters are strolling away. He calls them over, reaches in his pocket to give them some drinking money. They touch their caps to him. He turns back to Rafe. ‘I hope it does not seem I disdained the king’s efforts. I did not. He reasoned very well.’

Rafe says, ‘It appeared that you did not know what to do.’

He thinks, I did know. But I didn’t do it. I could have given my voice for Lambert. Or at least walked out.

‘Barnes played the hypocrite,’ he says. ‘But for the grace of God he would be standing there himself, accused.’

Rafe says, ‘Rob has done himself no harm today.’

Rafe leaves the rest unsaid. They go out into the cold. He thinks, I could have quoted, I could have cited. What has all my reading been for?

He puts his arm across Rafe’s shoulders. Rafe never fleshes; he is no hunter nor tennis-player, he is meagre as a boy, breakable. ‘Never fear,’ he says. ‘We shall prosper, son.’ The cold stings their faces.

It is not many days till the burning. He sends to Lambert food and drink, words of consolation and pity, but he asks himself, how can these be received? He knows I did not speak for him. I sat in the cockpit among those eager hard-eyed men, with the taste of blood in their mouths, and I did not lift a finger. Or raise my voice, except to read the sentence. But if the king would not consult me, what could I do? In all of The Book Called Henry, there is no precedent for it.

John Lambert’s end is a grand occasion. At Smithfield there are stands for the dignitaries, hung with the emblems of England, furnished with plush cushions. Every councillor is on parade, who is not actually sick in bed: each man hung with his chains of office, and the Garter badge for the elite. Seats with the best view are reserved for the principal ambassadors, for Castillon and Chapuys.

The day is a fiesta of pain. He has never seen a man suffer so. A spectator cannot make his eyes blind. He can only close them for moments together. He thinks, thank God that Gregory is safe down in Sussex. He could not look when Anne Boleyn died, and that was but a heartbeat: less.

Lambert is an hour dying. At his side, attending my lord Privy Seal, is a small boy, Thomas Cromwell, alias Harry Smith. There is a smear of ash on his bare arm; his body, beneath his jerkin, is cloudy with bruises.

In the starlit hour, Cranmer comes to see him. A pastoral visit. ‘You are not well?’

He will not admit to that. ‘Awake at all hours,’ he says. ‘It is Master Traitor Pole, he makes so much paperwork with his machinations.’

The archbishop looks helpless himself, exhausted. He, Lord Cromwell, calls for wine for him, for food if he will take it: a capon’s wing, plums. Cranmer shuffles in his chair. He blows his nose. He says, ‘You know, what we have begun will not come to fruition in one generation. You are past fifty. And I, not much less.’

‘Gardiner asked if I thought we were living in the last days.’

Cranmer darts a glance at him. ‘But you do not. Surely.’ The archbishop is biting his lip, like a man lifting a splinter with a needle.

‘I can see why good men want to believe that Christ is coming. We want His justice, when justice seems so long delayed.’

‘You think Lambert did not have justice?’

He looks up. It is not a trap.

He says, ‘You can’t pick and choose, if you serve a prince, week to week or cause to cause. Sometimes all you can do is lessen the damage. But here we failed.’

Cranmer says, ‘We must not make Thomas More’s mistake. He thought Henry’s conscience was his to command.’

The door opens. Cranmer starts. ‘Ah, Christophe –’

Christophe puts down a platter. ‘I think my master ought to have a holiday.’

‘Beyond my remit,’ Cranmer says faintly. ‘You know, when I was a boy I did suppose an archbishop could do anything. I supposed he could do miracles.’

‘I never gave it a thought,’ he says. ‘Christophe, bring fruit.’

The boy trundles out. He says, ‘The light of Christ leads us to some murky places.’

The archbishop is looking at his roast fowl. He says, ‘I cannot touch flesh. Not this evening.’

He says, ‘Have you ever seen a hawk keep killing, when the prey is dead?’

Cranmer flinches. ‘No,’ he says, ‘no. I think the king was … he surprised me … he was judicious, he was, at times, he was almost … fatherly.’

Ripping and stamping, rage in the eye. Sipping blood from the body cavity, then slashing again at the flesh.

‘Fatherly,’ he says. ‘Yes, he was.’

He thinks, after I saw Joan Boughton burned, I went home to my little life and I did not know if it was true or if I had dreamed it. I wondered if I might see her in the street, an elderly body about her business, going with her basket to buy cloves and apples for a pie.

Cranmer says, ‘But what else could we have done? Lambert chose his answers. It lay within his power to make others.’

‘I do not think it did.’

Cranmer considers that. To fill the silence he asks him, ‘How is your lady?’

‘Grete?’ Cranmer speaks as if he had other wives, one or two. ‘Grete is afraid. And tired of hiding. I assured her when I brought her to England that the king would be brought to a different opinion, and that we would be able to live freely like any couple. But as it is …’

His voice dies away. We are living on borrowed time, in small rooms, a bag always packed, an ear always alert; we sleep lightly and some nights hardly at all.

He says to Cranmer, ‘So what now? After this? If the king can burn this man he can burn us. What shall I do?’

‘Maintain your rule as long as you can. For the gospel’s sake I shall do the same.’

‘What use is our rule, if we could not save John Lambert?’

‘We could not save John Frith. Yet look at all we have been able to do, since Frith went into the fire. We could not save Tyndale, but we could save his book.’

True. Dead men are at work. Their cause is not lost. They labour on, screened from us by smoke.

When Cranmer has gone his household supply him with candles and wine and draw his door closed. They subdue their voices and walk as if wearing felt slippers. He takes a fresh sheet of paper and begins to write a letter. To my very loving friend Sir Thomas Wyatt, knight, the king’s ambassador with the Emperor.

He writes, The king’s Majesty, my lord prince’s grace, my ladies his daughters, and the rest of his council be all merry and in good prosperity …

When I was a young man, he thinks, I needed all my strength. Pity was a luxury I might one day afford, like fine white bread or a book; a sound roof over my head, a light of amber or blue glass, a ring for my finger; an ell of pearled brocade, a lute, a beechwood fire; a safe hand to light it.

The xvith day of this present …

Origen says for each man God makes a scroll, which is rolled and hidden in the heart. God inscribes with a quill, a reed, a bone.

… the king’s Majesty, for the reverence of the holy sacrament of the altar …

He thinks of adding, our monarch wore white. Head to toe he shone. Like a mirror. Like a light. He writes, I wish the princes of Europe could have seen it, heard it – with what gravity he strove for the conversion of this poor miserable wretch …

His hand moves across the paper, the ink unites with its weave. The firelight stirs, a candle flame bows and blurs. He remembers riding with Gregory across the downs, under a silver sky: the light without shadow, like the light at the beginning of the world.

If those princes had been with me today, he writes, they would have seen Henry’s learning and marvelled at it. They would have witnessed his judgement, his policy: they would have seen him as – he lifts his pen for an instant from the page – the mirror and light of all other kings and princes in Christendom.

Among his papers he still has a verse from Tom Truth’s pen. It has become loose from its poem, but he has it by heart.

But since my fancy leads her so

And leads my friendship from the light

And walketh me darkling to and fro

While other friends may walk in sight …

Even the worst poets, from time to time, hit on a felicitous phrasing. You can see the flicker, as the human form passes from light to dark and back again. He looks around the room. The subdued glow of the turkey carpet. His books bound in kidskin and calf. The silver plate, reflecting himself to himself: the mirror and light of all councillors that are in Christendom.

He puts down his pen. He thinks, this letter will not do, tomorrow I will fill in the gaps; or perhaps not, tomorrow they want me at the Tower. He is too tired, too shaken, too riven by horror and desolation to describe in any detail the judgement of Lambert, let alone his last day. He writes, I doubt not some of your friends who have leisure shall by their letters advertise you of the whole discourse …

Let them. He closes his eyes. What does God see? Cromwell in the fifty-fourth year of his age, in all his weight and gravitas, his bulk wrapped in wool and fur? Or a mere flicker, an illusion, a spark beneath a shoe, a spit in the ocean, a feather in a desert, a wisp, a phantom, a needle in a haystack? If Henry is the mirror, he is the pale actor who sheds no lustre of his own, but spins in a reflected light. If the light moves he is gone.

When I was in Italy, he thinks, I saw Virgins painted on every wall, I saw in every fresco the sponged blood-colour of Christ’s robe. I saw the sinuous tempter that winds from a branch, and Adam’s face as he was tempted. I saw that the serpent was a woman, and about her face were curls of silver-gilt; I saw her writhe about the green bough, saw it sway under her coils. I saw the lamentation of Heaven over Christ crucified, angels flying and crying at the same time. I saw torturers nimble as dancers hurling stones at St Stephen, and I saw the martyr’s bored face as he waited for death. I saw a dead child cast in bronze, standing over its own corpse: and all these pictures, images, I took into myself, as some kind of prophecy or sign. But I have known men and women, better than me and closer to grace, who have meditated on every splinter of the cross, till they forget who and what they are, and observe the Saviour’s blood, running in the soaked fibres of the wood. Till they believe themselves no longer captive to misfortune nor crime, nor in thrall to a useless sacrifice in an alien land. Till they see Christ’s cross is the tree of life, and the truth breaks inside them, and they are saved.

He sands his paper. Puts down his pen. I believe, but I do not believe enough. I said to Lambert, my prayers are with you, but in the end I only prayed for myself, that I might not suffer the same death.