If he had been her adviser, he would have kept the queen in court, however much she squealed. Because, would the witnesses have spoken, to her face, as they spoke behind her back? She would be ashamed to face them, gnarled and grizzled and each equipped with perfect recollection; but he would have had her greet them cordially, and declare she would never have recognised them, after so much time gone by; and ask if they have grandchildren, and whether the summer heat eases their elderly aches and pains? The greater shame would be theirs: would they not hesitate, would they not falter, under the steady gaze of the queen’s honest eyes?
Without Katherine present, the trial becomes a bawdy entertainment. The Earl of Shrewsbury is before the court, a man who fought with the old king at Bosworth. He recalls his own long-ago wedding night, when he was, like Prince Arthur, a boy of fifteen; never had a woman before, he says, but did his duty to his bride. On Arthur’s wedding night, he and the Earl of Oxford had taken the prince to Katherine’s chamber. Yes, says the Marquis of Dorset, and I was there too; Katherine lay under the coverlet, the prince got into bed beside her. ‘No one is willing to swear to having climbed in with them,’ Rafe whispers. ‘But I wonder they haven’t found someone.’
The court must make do with evidence of what was said next morning. The prince, coming out of the bridal chamber, said he was thirsty and asked Sir Anthony Willoughby for a cup of ale. ‘Last night I was in Spain,’ he said. A little boy’s crude joke, dragged back into the light; the boy has been, these thirty years, a corpse. How lonely it is to die young, to go down into the dark without any company! Maurice St John is not there with him, in his vault at Worcester Cathedral: nor Mr Cromer nor William Woodall, nor any of the men who heard him say, ‘Masters, it is good pastime to have a wife.’
When they have listened to all this, and they come out into the air, he feels strangely cold. He puts a hand to his face, touches his cheekbone. Rafe says, ‘It would be a poor sort of bridegroom who would come out in the morning and say, “Good day, masters. Nothing done!” He was boasting, wasn’t he? That was all. They’ve forgotten what it’s like to be fifteen.’
Even as the court is sitting, King François in Italy is losing a battle. Pope Clement is preparing to sign a new treaty with the Emperor, Queen Katherine’s nephew. He doesn’t know this when he says, ‘This is a bad day’s work. If we want Europe to laugh at us, they’ve every reason now.’
He looks sideways at Rafe, whose particular problem, clearly, is that he cannot imagine anyone, even a hasty fifteen-year-old, wanting to penetrate Katherine. It would be like copulation with a statue. Rafe, of course, has not heard the cardinal on the subject of the queen’s former attractions. ‘Well, I reserve judgment. Which is what the court will do. It’s all they can do.’ He says, ‘Rafe, you are so much closer in these matters. I can’t remember being fifteen.’
‘Surely? Were you not fifteen or so when you fetched up in France?’
‘Yes, I must have been.’ Wolsey: ‘Arthur would have been about your age, Thomas, if he had lived.’ He remembers a woman in Dover, up against a wall; her small crushable bones, her young, bleak, pallid face. He feels a small sensation of panic, loss; what if the cardinal’s joke isn’t a joke, and the earth is strewn with his children, and he has never done right by them? It is the only honest thing to be done: look after your children. ‘Rafe,’ he says, ‘do you know I haven’t made my will? I said I would but I never did. I think I should go home and draft it.’
‘Why?’ Rafe looks amazed. ‘Why now? The cardinal will want you.’
‘Come home.’ He takes Rafe’s arm. On his left side, a hand touches his: fingers without flesh. A ghost walks: Arthur, studious and pale. King Henry, he thinks, you raised him; now you put him down.
July 1529: Thomas Cromwell of London, gentleman. Being whole in body and memory. To his son Gregory six hundred and sixty-six pounds thirteen shillings and four pence. And featherbeds, bolsters and the quilt of yellow turkey satin, the joined bed of Flanders work and the carved press and the cupboards, the silver and the silver gilt and twelve silver spoons. And leases of farms to be held for him by the executors till he comes to full age, and another two hundred pounds for him in gold at that date. Money to the executors for the upbringing and marriage portions of his daughter Anne, and his little daughter Grace. A marriage portion for his niece Alice Wellyfed; gowns, jackets and doublets to his nephews; to Mercy all sorts of household stuff and some silver and anything else the executors think she should have. Bequests to his dead wife’s sister Johane, and her husband John Williamson, and a marriage portion to her daughter, also Johane. Money to his servants. Forty pounds to be divided between forty poor maidens on their marriage. Twenty pounds for mending the roads. Ten pounds towards feeding poor prisoners in the London gaols.
His body to be buried in the parish where he dies: or at the direction of his executors.
The residue of his estate to be spent on Masses for his parents.
To God his soul. To Rafe Sadler his books.
When the summer plague comes back, he says to Mercy and Johane, shall we send the children out?
In which direction, Johane says: not challenging him, just wanting to know.
Mercy says, can anyone outrun it? They take comfort from a belief that since the infection killed so many last year, it won’t be so violent this year; which he does not think is necessarily true, and he thinks they seem to be endowing this plague with a human or at least bestial intelligence: the wolf comes down on the sheepfold, but not on the nights when the men with dogs are waiting for him. Unless they think the plague is more than bestial or human – that it is God behind it – God, up to his old tricks. When he hears the bad news from Italy, about Clement’s new treaty with the Emperor, Wolsey bows his head and says, ‘My Master is capricious.’ He doesn’t mean the king.
On the last day of July, Cardinal Campeggio adjourns the legatine court. It is, he says, the Roman holidays. News comes that the Duke of Suffolk, the king’s great friend, has hammered the table before Wolsey, and threatened him to his face. They all know the court will never sit again. They all know the cardinal has failed.
That evening with Wolsey he believes, for the first time, that the cardinal will come down. If he falls, he thinks, I come down with him. His reputation is black. It is as if the cardinal’s joke has been incarnated: as if he wades through streams of blood, leaving in his wake a trail of smashed glass and fires, of widows and orphans. Cromwell, people say: that’s a bad man. The cardinal will not talk about what is happening in Italy, or what has happened in the legate’s court. He says, ‘They tell me the sweating sickness is back. What shall I do? Shall I die? I have fought four bouts with it. In the year … what year? … I think it was 1518 … now you will laugh, but it was so – when the sweat had finished with me, I looked like Bishop Fisher. My flesh was wasted. God picked me up and rattled my teeth.’
‘Your Grace was wasted?’ he says, trying to raise a smile. ‘I wish you’d had your portrait made then.’
Bishop Fisher has said in court – just before the Roman holidays set in – that no power, human or divine, could dissolve the marriage of the king and queen. If there’s one thing he’d like to teach Fisher, it’s not to make grand overstatements. He has an idea of what the law can do, and it’s different from what Bishop Fisher thinks.
Until now, every day till today, every evening till this, if you told Wolsey a thing was impossible, he’d just laugh. Tonight he says – when he can be brought to the point – my friend King François is beaten and I am beaten too. I don’t know what to do. Plague or no plague, I think I may die.
‘I must go home,’ he says. ‘But will you bless me?’
He kneels before him. Wolsey raises his hand, and then,