Wolf Hall: Bring Up the Bodies

‘He asked me if I would look kindly on him.’

‘Kindly on him when?’

‘For instance, if he wrote me a poem. Praising my beauty. So I said I would. I would thank him for it. I wouldn’t laugh, even behind my hand. And I wouldn’t raise any objection to any statements he might make in verse. Even if they were exaggerated. Because in poems it is usual to exaggerate.’

He, Cromwell, congratulates her. ‘You have it covered from every angle, Mistress Seymour. You would have made a sharp lawyer.’

‘You mean, if I had been born a man?’ She frowns. ‘But still, it is not likely, Master Secretary. The Seymours are not tradesmen.’

Edward Seymour says, ‘Good mistress. Write you verse. Very well. Good so far. But if he attempts anything on your person, you must scream.’

Jane says, ‘What if nobody came?’

He puts his hand on Edward’s arm. He wants to stop this scene developing any further. ‘Listen, Jane. Don’t scream. Pray. Pray aloud, I mean. Mental prayer will not do it. Say a prayer with the Holy Virgin in it. Something that will appeal to His Majesty’s piety and sense of honour.’

‘I understand,’ Jane says. ‘Do you have a prayer book on your person, Master Secretary? Brothers? No matter. I will go and look for mine. I am sure I can find something that will fit the bill.’

In early December, he receives word from Katherine’s doctors that she is eating better, though praying no less. Death has moved, perhaps, from the head of the bed to its foot. Her recent pains have eased and she is lucid; she uses the time to make her bequests. She leaves her daughter Mary a gold collar she brought from Spain, and her furs. She asks for five hundred masses to be said for her soul, and for a pilgrimage to be made to Walsingham.

Details of the dispositions make their way back to Whitehall. ‘These furs,’ Henry says, ‘have you seen them, Cromwell? Are they any good? If they are, I want them sent down to me.’

Teeter-totter.

The women around Anne say, you would not think she was enceinte. In October she looked well enough, but now she seems to be losing flesh, rather than gaining. Jane Rochford tells him, ‘You would almost think she is ashamed of her condition. And His Majesty is not attentive to her, as formerly he was attentive when her belly was big. Then, he could not do enough for her. He would cater to her whims and wait on her like a maid. I once came in to find her feet in his lap, and he rubbing them like an ostler nursing some splay-hooved mare.’

‘Rubbing doesn’t help a splayed hoof,’ he says, earnest. ‘You have to trim it and fit a special shoe.’

Rochford stares at him. ‘Have you been talking to Jane Seymour?’

‘Why?’

‘Never mind,’ she says.

He has seen Anne’s face as she watches the king, as she watches the king watching Jane. You expect black anger, and the enactment of it: scissored-up sewing, broken glass. Instead, her face is narrow; she holds her jewelled sleeve across her body, where the child is growing. ‘I must not disturb myself,’ she says. ‘It could injure the prince.’ She pulls her skirts aside when Jane passes. She huddles into herself, narrow shoulders shrinking; she looks cold as a doorstep orphan.

Teeter-totter.

The rumour in the country is that Master Secretary has brought a woman back from his recent trip to Hertfordshire, or Bedfordshire, and set her up in his house at Stepney, or at Austin Friars, or at King’s Place in Hackney, which he is rebuilding for her in lavish style. She is the keeper of an inn, and her husband has been seized and locked up, for a new crime invented by Thomas Cromwell. The poor cuckold is to be charged and hanged at the next assize; though, by some reports, he has already been found dead in his prison, bludgeoned, poisoned, and with his throat cut.

III

Angels

STEPNEY AND GREENWICH,

CHRISTMAS 1535–NEW YEAR 1536

Christmas morning: he comes hurtling out in pursuit of whatever trouble is next. A huge toad blocks his path. ‘Is that Matthew?’

From the amphibian mouth, a juvenile chortle. ‘Simon. Merry Christmas, sir, how do you?’

He sighs. ‘Overworked. Did you send your duties to your mother and father?’

The singing children go home in the summer. At Christmas, they are busy singing. ‘Will you be going to see the king, sir?’ Simon croaks. ‘I bet their plays at court are not so good as ours. We are playing Robin Hood, and King Arthur is in it. I play Merlin’s toad. Master Richard Cromwell plays the Pope and has a begging bowl. He cries “Mumpsimus sumpsimus, hocus pocus.” We give him stones for alms. He threatens us with Hell.’

He pats Simon’s warty skin. The toad clears his path with a ponderous hop.

Since his return from Kimbolton, London has closed around him: late autumn, her fading and melancholy evenings, her early dark. The sedate and ponderous arrangements of the court have enfolded him, entrapped him into desk-bound days prolonged by candlelight into desk-bound nights; sometimes he would give a king’s ransom to see the sun. He is buying land in the lusher parts of England, but he has no leisure to visit it; so these farms, these ancient manors in their walled gardens, these watercourses with their little quays, these ponds with their gilded fish