Harry Percy, Earl of Northumberland: a sick and indebted young nobleman, once betrothed to Anne Boleyn.
Francis Bryan, ‘the Vicar of Hell’, related to both the Boleyns and the Seymours.
Nicholas Carew, Master of the Horse: an enemy of the Boleyns.
William Fitzwilliam, Master Treasurer, also an enemy of the Boleyns.
Henry Norris, known as ‘Gentle Norris’, chief of the king’s privy chamber.
Francis Weston, a reckless and extravagant young gentleman.
William Brereton, a hard-nosed and quarrelsome older gentleman.
Mark Smeaton, a suspiciously well-dressed musician.
Elizabeth, Lady Worcester, a lady-in-waiting to Anne Boleyn.
Hans Holbein, a painter.
The clerics
Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury: Cromwell’s friend.
Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester: Cromwell’s enemy.
Richard Sampson, legal adviser to the king in his matrimonial affairs.
The officers of state
Thomas Wriothesley, known as Call-Me-Risley, Clerk of the Signet.
Richard Riche, Solicitor General.
Thomas Audley, Lord Chancellor.
The ambassadors
Eustache Chapuys, ambassador of Emperor Charles V.
Jean de Dinteville, a French envoy.
The reformers
Humphrey Monmouth, wealthy merchant, friend of Cromwell and evangelical sympathiser: patron of William Tyndale, the Bible translator, now in prison in the Low Countries.
Robert Packington: a merchant of similar sympathies.
Stephen Vaughan, a merchant at Antwerp, friend and agent of Cromwell.
The ‘old families’ with claims to the throne
Margaret Pole, niece of King Edward IV, supporter of Katherine of Aragon and the Princess Mary.
Henry, Lord Montague, her son.
Henry Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter.
Gertrude, his ambitious wife.
At the Tower of London
Sir William Kingston, the constable.
Lady Kingston, his wife.
Edmund Walsingham, his deputy.
Lady Shelton, aunt of Anne Boleyn.
A French executioner.
His children are falling from the sky. He watches from horseback, acres of England stretching behind him; they drop, gilt-winged, each with a blood-filled gaze. Grace Cromwell hovers in thin air. She is silent when she takes her prey, silent as she glides to his fist. But the sounds she makes then, the rustle of feathers and the creak, the sigh and riffle of pinion, the small cluck-cluck from her throat, these are sounds of recognition, intimate, daughterly, almost disapproving. Her breast is gore-streaked and flesh clings to her claws.
Later, Henry will say, ‘Your girls flew well today.’ The hawk Anne Cromwell bounces on the glove of Rafe Sadler, who rides by the king in easy conversation. They are tired; the sun is declining, and they ride back to Wolf Hall with the reins slack on the necks of their mounts. Tomorrow his wife and two sisters will go out. These dead women, their bones long sunk in London clay, are now transmigrated. Weightless, they glide on the upper currents of the air. They pity no one. They answer to no one. Their lives are simple. When they look down they see nothing but their prey, and the borrowed plumes of the hunters: they see a flittering, flinching universe, a universe filled with their dinner.
All summer has been like this, a riot of dismemberment, fur and feather flying; the beating off and the whipping in of hounds, the coddling of tired horses, the nursing, by the gentlemen, of contusions, sprains and blisters. And for a few days at least, the sun has shone on Henry. Sometime before noon, clouds scudded in from the west and rain fell in big scented drops; but the sun re-emerged with a scorching heat, and now the sky is so clear you can see into Heaven and spy on what the saints are doing.
As they dismount, handing their horses to the grooms and waiting on the king, his mind is already moving to paperwork: to dispatches from Whitehall, galloped down by the post routes that are laid wherever the court shifts. At supper with the Seymours, he will defer to any stories his hosts wish to tell: to anything the king may venture, tousled and happy and amiable as he seems tonight. When the king has gone to bed, his working night will begin.
Though the day is over, Henry seems disinclined to go indoors. He stands looking about him, inhaling horse sweat, a broad, brick-red streak of sunburn across his forehead. Early in the day he lost his hat, so by custom all the hunting party were obliged to take off theirs. The king refused all offers of substitutes. As dusk steals over the woods and fields, servants will be out looking for the stir of the black plume against darkening grass, or the glint of his hunter’s badge, a gold St Hubert with sapphire eyes.
Already you can feel the autumn. You know there will not be many more days like these; so let us stand, the horseboys of Wolf Hall swarming around us, Wiltshire and the western counties stretching into a haze of blue; let us stand, the king’s hand on his shoulder, Henry’s face earnest as he talks his way back through the landscape of the day, the green copses and rushing streams, the alders by the water’s edge, the early haze that lifted by nine; the brief shower, the small wind that died and settled; the stillness, the afternoon heat.
‘Sir, how are you not burned?’ Rafe Sadler demands. A redhead like the king, he has turned a mottled, freckled pink, and even his eyes look sore. He, Thomas Cromwell, shrugs; he hangs an arm around Rafe’s shoulders as they drift indoors. He went through the whole of Italy – the battlefield as well as the shaded arena of the counting house – without losing his London pallor. His ruffian childhood, the days on the river, the days in the fields: they left him as white as God made him. ‘Cromwell has the skin of a lily,’ the king pronounces. ‘The only particular in which he resembles that or any other blossom.’ Teasing him, they amble towards supper.
The king had left Whitehall the week of Thomas More’s death, a miserable dripping week in July, the hoof prints of the royal entourage sinking deep into the mud as they tacked their way across to Windsor. Since then the progress has taken in a swathe of the western counties; the Cromwell aides, having finished up the king’s business at the London end, met up with the royal train in mid-August. The king and his companions sleep sound in new houses of rosy brick, in old houses whose fortifications have crumbled away or been pulled down, and in fantasy castles like toys, castles never capable of fortification, with walls a cannonball would punch in as if they were paper. England has enjoyed fifty years of peace. This is the Tudors’ covenant; peace is what they offer. Every household strives to put forward its best show for the king, and we’ve seen some panic-stricken plastering these last weeks, some speedy stonework, as his hosts hurry to display the Tudor rose beside their own devices. They search out and obliterate any trace