Wolf Hall: Bring Up the Bodies

Slow smiles ripple around the table. He watches Call-Me. He was once a protege of Stephen Gardiner. But he seems as joyful as the rest. Richard Riche turns pink, rises from the table and wrings his hand.

‘Get him on the road,’ Rafe says, ‘and let him stay away. Gardiner is double in everything.’

‘Double?’ he says. ‘He has a tongue like a three-pronged eel spear. First he is for the Pope, then Henry, then, mark what I say, he will be for the Pope again.’

‘Can we trust him abroad?’ Riche says.

‘We can trust him only to know where his advantage lies. Which is with the king for now. And we can keep an eye on him, put some of our men in his train. Master Wriothesley, you can see to that, I think?’

Only Gregory seems dubious. ‘My lord Winchester, an ambassador? Fitzwilliam tells me, an ambassador’s first duty is to give no affront.’

He nods. ‘And Stephen gives nothing but affront, does he?’

‘Is not an ambassador supposed to be a cheerful fellow and affable? So Fitzwilliam tells me. He should be pleasant in any company, conversable and easy, and he should endear himself to his hosts. So he has chances to visit their homes, sit at their boards, become friendly with their wives and their heirs, and corrupt their household to his service.’

Rafe’s eyebrows shoot up. ‘Is that what Fitz teaches you?’ The boys laugh.

‘It’s true,’ he says. ‘That is what an ambassador must do. So I hope Chapuys is not corrupting you, Gregory? If I had a wife, he would be sneaking sonnets to her, I know it, and bringing in bones for my dogs. Ah well…Chapuys, he is pleasant company, you see. Not like Stephen Gardiner. But the truth is, Gregory, we need a stout ambassador for the French, a man full of spleen and spite. And Stephen has been among them before, and done himself credit. The French are hypocrites, pretending false friendship and demanding money as the price of it. You see,’ he says, setting himself to educate his son. ‘Just now the French have a plan to take the duchy of Milan from the Emperor, and they want us to subsidise them. And we must accommodate them, or seem to, for fear they will veer about and join with the Emperor and overwhelm us. So when the day comes that they say, “Deliver over the gold you have promised,” we need that kind of ambassador, like Stephen, who will brazen it out and say, “Oh, the gold? Just take it out of what you already owe King Henry.” King Francis will be spitting fire, yet in a manner we will have kept our word. You understand? We save our fiercest champions for the French court. Recall that my lord Norfolk was sometime ambassador there.’

Gregory dips his head. ‘Any foreigner would fear Norfolk.’

‘And any Englishman too. With good reason. Now the duke is like one of those giant cannon the Turks have. The blast is shocking but it needs three hours’ cooling time before it can fire again. Whereas Bishop Gardiner, he can explode at ten-minute intervals, dawn to dusk.’

‘But sir,’ Gregory bursts out, ‘if we promise them money, and we don’t deliver it, what will they do?’

‘By then, I hope, we will be firm friends with the Emperor again.’ He sighs. ‘It is an old game and it seems we must go on playing it, until I think of something better, or the king does. You have heard of the Emperor’s recent victory at Tunis?’

‘The whole world is talking of it,’ Gregory says. ‘Every Christian knight wishes he had been there.’

He shrugs. ‘Time will tell how glorious it is. Barbarossa will soon find another base for his piracy. But with such a victory behind him, and the Turk quiet for the moment, the Emperor may turn on us and invade our shores.’

‘But how do we stop him?’ Gregory looks desperate. ‘Must we not have Queen Katherine back?

Call-Me laughs. ‘Gregory begins to perceive the difficulties of our trade, sir.’

‘I liked it better when we talked of the present queen,’ Gregory says in a low voice. ‘And I got the credit for observing she was fatter.’

Call-Me says kindly, ‘I should not laugh. You have the right of it, Gregory. All our labours, our sophistry, all our learning both acquired or pretended; the stratagems of state, the lawyers’ decrees, the churchmen’s curses, and the grave resolutions of judges, sacred and secular: all and each can be defeated by a woman’s body, can they not? God should have made their bellies transparent, and saved us the hope and fear. But perhaps what grows in there has to grow in the dark.’

‘They say that Katherine is ailing,’ Richard Riche says. ‘If she should die within the year, I wonder what world would be then?’

But look: we have sat here too long! Let’s be up and out into the gardens of Austin Friars, Master Secretary’s pride; he wants the plants he saw flowering abroad, he wants better fruit, so he nags the ambassadors to send him shoots and cuttings in the diplomatic bag. The keen young clerks stand by, ready to break a code, and all that tumbles out is a rootball, still pulsing with life after a journey through the straits of Dover.

He wants tender things to live, young men to thrive. So he has built a tennis court, a gift to Richard and Gregory and all the young men of his house. He is not quite beyond the game himself…if he could play a blind man, he says, or an opponent with one leg. Much of the game is tactics; his foot drags, he has to rely on cunning rather than speed. But he is proud of his building and glad to stand the expense. He has recently consulted with the king’s keepers of tennis at Hampton Court, and had the measurements adjusted to those Henry prefers; the king has been to Austin Friars to dine, so it is not unpossible that one day he may call in for an afternoon on the court.

In Italy, when he was a servant in Frescobaldi’s household, the boys would go out in the hot evening and play games in the street. It was tennis of a kind, a jeu de paume, no racquets but just the hand; they would jostle and push and scream, bounce the ball off the walls and run it along a tailor’s awning, till the master himself would come out and scold: ‘If you boys don’t respect my awning, I’ll shear off your testicles and hang them over the doorway on a ribbon.’ They would say sorry, master, sorry, and back off down the street, and play subdued in a back court. But half an hour later they would be back again, and he can still hear it in his dreams, the rattle as the ball’s crude seam hit metal and skimmed into the air; he can feel the slap of leather against his palm. In those days, though he was carrying an injury he tried to run the stiffness off: this injury he’d got the other year, when he was at Garigliano with the French army. The garzoni would say, look Tommaso, how is it you got the wound in the back of the leg, were you running away? He would say, Mother of God, yes: I was only paid enough for running away, if you want me facing the front you have to pay me extra.

From this massacre the French scattered, and in those days he was French; the King of France paid his wages. He had crawled then limped, he and his comrades dragging their battered bodies as fast as they could from the victorious Spanish, trying to struggle back to ground not bogged with blood; they were wild Welsh bowmen and