sigh, as the nation arranges itself to pray. ‘She sent me a letter,’ Henry says. He slides it from among the folds of his yellow jacket. ‘I don’t want it. Here, Cromwell, take it away.’
As he folds it he glances at it: ‘
After the dancing, Anne calls him in. She is sombre, dry, attentive: all business. ‘I wish to make my thoughts known to Lady Mary the king’s daughter.’ He notes the respectful address. It isn’t ‘the Princess Mary’. But it isn’t ‘the Spanish bastard’ either. ‘Now that her mother is gone and cannot influence her,’ Anne says, ‘we may hope she will be less stiff in maintaining her errors. I have no need to conciliate her, God knows. But I think if I could put an end to the ill-feeling between the king and Mary, he would thank me for it.’
‘He would be beholden to you, madam. And it would be an act of charity.’
‘I wish to be a mother to her.’ Anne flushes; it does sound unlikely. ‘I do not expect her to call me “my lady mother”, but I expect her to call me Your Highness. If she will conform herself to her father I shall be pleased to have her at court. She will have an honoured place, and not much below mine. I shall not expect a deep reverence from her, but the ordinary form of courtesy which royal persons use among themselves, within their families, the younger to the elder. Assure her, I shall not make her carry my train. She will not have to sit at table with her sister the Princess Elizabeth, so no question of her lower rank will arise. I think this is a fair offer.’ He waits. ‘If she will render me the respect which is my due, I shall not walk before her on ordinary occasions, but we will walk hand in hand.’
For one so tender about her dignities as Anne the queen, it is an unparalleled set of concessions. But he imagines Mary’s face when it is put to her. He is glad he will not be there to see it in person.
He makes a respectful good night, but Anne calls him back. She says, in a low voice: ‘Cremuel, this is my offer, I will go no further. I am resolved to make it and then I cannot be blamed. But I do not think she will take it, and then we will both be sorry, for we are condemned to fight till the breath goes out of our bodies. She is my death, and I am hers. So tell her, I shall make sure she does not live to laugh at me after I am gone.’
He goes to Chapuys’s house to pay his condolences. The ambassador is wrapped in black. A draught is cutting through his rooms that seems to blow straight from the river, and his mood is one of self-reproach. ‘How I wish I had not left her! But she seemed better. She sat up that morning and they dressed her hair. I had seen her eat some bread, a mouthful or two, I thought that was an advance. I rode away in hope, and within hours she was failing.’
‘You must not blame yourself. Your master will know you did all you could. After all, you are sent here to watch the king, you cannot be too long from London in the winter.’
He thinks, I have been there since Katherine’s trials began: a hundred scholars, a thousand lawyers, ten thousand hours of argument. Almost since the first word was spoken against her marriage, for the cardinal kept me informed; late at night with a glass of wine, he would talk about the king’s great matter and how he saw it would work out.
Badly, he said.
‘Oh, this fire,’ Chapuys says. ‘Do you call this a fire? Do you call this a climate?’ Smoke from the wood eddies past them. ‘Smoke and smells and no heat!’
‘Get a stove. I’ve got stoves.’
‘Oh, yes,’ the ambassador moans, ‘but then the servants stuff them with rubbish and they blow up. Or the chimneys fall apart and you have to send across the sea for a man to fix them. I know all about stoves.’ He rubs his blue hands. ‘I told her chaplain, you know. When she is on her deathbed, I said, ask her whether Prince Arthur left her a virgin or not. All the world must believe a declaration made by a dying woman. But he is an old man. In his grief and trouble he forgot. So now we will never be sure.’
That is a large admission, he thinks: that the truth may be other than what Katherine told us all these years. ‘But do you know,’ Chapuys says, ‘before I left her, she said a troubling thing to me. She said, “It might be all my fault. That I stood out against the king, when I could have made an honourable withdrawal and let him marry again.” I said to her, madam – because I was amazed – madam, what are you thinking, you have right on your side, the great weight of opinion, both lay and clerical – “Ah but,” she said to me, “to the lawyers there was doubt in the case. And if I erred, then I drove the king, who does not brook opposition, to act according to his worse nature, and therefore I partly share in the guilt of his sin.” I said to her, good madam, only the harshest authority would say so; let the king bear his own sins, let him answer for them. But she shook her head.’ Chapuys shakes his, distressed, perplexed. ‘All those deaths, the good Bishop Fisher, Thomas More, the sainted monks of the Charterhouse…“I am going out of life,” she said, “dragging their corpses.”’
He is silent. Chapuys crosses the room to his desk and opens a little inlaid box. ‘Do you know what this is?’
He picks up the silk flower, carefully in case it falls to dust in his fingers. ‘Yes. Her present from Henry. Her present when the New Year’s prince was born.’
‘It shows the king in a good light. I would not have believed him so tender. I am sure I would not have thought to do it.’
‘You are a sad old bachelor, Eustache.’
‘And you a sad old widower. What did you give your wife, when your lovely Gregory was born?’
‘Oh, I suppose…a gold dish. A gold chalice. Something to set up on her shelf.’ He hands back the silk flower. ‘A city wife wants a present she can weigh.’
‘Katherine gave me this rose as we parted,’ Chapuys says. ‘She said, it is all I have to bequeath. She told me, choose a flower from the coffer and go. I kissed her hand and took to the road.’ He sighs. He drops the flower on his desk and slides his hands into his sleeves. ‘They tell me the concubine is consulting diviners to tell the sex of her child, although she did that before and they all told her it was a boy. Well, the queen’s death has altered the position of the concubine. But not perhaps in the way she would like.’
He lets that pass. He waits. Chapuys says, ‘I am informed that Henry paraded his little bastard about the court when he heard the news.’
Elizabeth is a forward child, he tells the ambassador. But then you must remember that, when he was hardly a year older than his daughter is now, the young Henry rode through London, perched on the saddle of a warhorse, six feet from the ground and gripping the pommel with fat infant fists. You should not discount her, he tells Chapuys, just because she is young. The Tudors are warriors from their cradle.
