Wolf Hall: Bring Up the Bodies

out that the money raised could pay for a standing army.

But this is not the time to put it to Henry. The king falls to his knees and prays to whatever saint guards knights in the lists. ‘Majesty,’ he says, ‘if you run against my son Gregory, will you forbear to unhorse him? If you can help it?’

But the king says, ‘I would not mind if little Gregory unhorsed me. Though it is unlikely, I would take it in good part. And we cannot help what we do, really. Once you are thundering down at a man, you cannot check.’ He stops himself and says kindly, ‘It is quite a rare event, you know, to bring your opponent down. It is not the sole aim of the contest. If you are concerned about what showing he will make, you need not be. He is very able. He would not be a combatant otherwise. One cannot break a lance on a timid opponent, he must run at full pace against you. Besides, no one ever does badly. It is not allowed. You know how the heralds put it. As it might be, “Gregory Cromwell has jousted well, Henry Norris has jousted very well, but our Sovereign Lord the king has jousted best of all.”’

‘And have you, sir?’ He smiles to take any sting from the words.

‘I know you councillors think I should take to the spectators’ bench. And I will, I promise, it has not escaped me that a man of my age is past his best. But you see, Crumb, it is hard to give up what you have worked at since you were a boy. There were some Italian visitors once, they were cheering us on, Brandon and myself, and they thought that Achilles and Hector had come back to life. So they said.’

But which is which? One dragged through the dust by the other…

The king says, ‘You turn your boy out beautifully, and your nephew Richard too. No nobleman could do more. They are a credit to your house.’

Gregory has done well. Gregory has done very well. Gregory has done best of all. ‘I don’t want him to be Achilles,’ he says, ‘I only want him not to be flattened.’

There is a correspondence between the score sheet and the human body, in that the paper has divisions marked off, for the head and the torso. A touch on the breastplate is recorded, but not fractured ribs. A touch on the helm is recorded, but not a cracked skull. You can pick up the score sheets afterwards and read back a record of the day, but the marks on paper do not tell you about the pain of a broken ankle or the efforts of a suffocating man not to vomit inside his helmet. As the combatants will always tell you, you really needed to see it, you had to be there.

Gregory was disappointed when his father had excused himself from watching. He pleaded a prior engagement with his papers. The Vatican is offering Henry three months to return to obedience, or the bull of excommunication against him will be printed and distributed through Europe, and every Christian hand will be against him. The Emperor’s fleet is set for Algiers, with forty thousand armed men. The abbot of Fountains has been systematically robbing his own treasury, and entertains six whores, though presumably he needs a rest between. And the parliamentary session opens in a fortnight.

He had met an old knight once, in Venice, one of those men who had made a career of riding to tournaments all over Europe. The man had described his life to him, crossing frontiers with his band of esquires and his string of horses, always on the move from one prize to the next, till age and the accumulation of injuries put him out of the game. On his own now, he tried to pick up a living teaching young lords, enduring mockery and time-wasting; in my day, he had said, the young were taught manners, but now I find myself fettling horses and polishing breastplates for some little tosspot I wouldn’t have let clean my boots in the old days; for look at me now, reduced to drinking with, what are you, an Englishman?

The knight was a Portuguese, but he spoke dog-Latin and a kind of German, interspersed with technicalities which are much the same in all languages. In the old days each tournament was a testing-ground. There was no display of idle luxury. Women, instead of simpering at you from gilded pavilions, were kept for afterwards. In those days the scoring was complex and the judges had no mercy on any infringement of the rules, so you could shatter all your lances but lose on points, you could flatten your opposer and come out not with a bag of gold but with a fine or a blot on your record. A breach of rules would trail you through Europe, so some infringements committed, let’s say, in Lisbon, would catch up with you in Ferrara; a man’s reputation would go before him, and in the end, he said, given a bad season, a run of ill-luck, reputation’s all you’ve got; so don’t you push your luck, he said, when fortune’s star is shining, because the next minute, it isn’t. Come to that, don’t pay out good money for horoscopes. If things are going to go badly for you, is that what you need to know as you saddle up?

One drink in, the old knight talked as if everybody had followed his trade. You should set your squires, he said, at each end of the barrier, to make your horse swerve wide if he tries to cut the corner, or else you may catch your foot, easy done if there’s no end-guard, bloody painful: have you ever done that? Some fools collect their boys in the middle, where the atteint will occur; but what’s the use? Indeed, he agreed, what use at all: and wondered at that delicate word, atteint, for the brutal shock of contact. These spring-loaded shields, the old man said, have you seen them, they jump apart when they’re hit? Babies’ tricks. The old-time judges didn’t need a device like that to tell them when a man had got a touch – no, they used their eyes, they had eyes in those days. Look, he said: there are three ways to fail. Horse can fail. Boys can fail. Nerve can fail.

You have to get your helmet on tightly so that you have a good line of sight. You keep your body square-on, and when you are about to strike, then and only then turn your head so that you have a full view of your opposer, and watch the iron tip of your lance straight on to your target. Some people veer away in the second before the clash. It is natural, but forget what is natural. Practise till you break your instinct. Given a chance you will always swerve. Your body wants to preserve itself and your instinct will try to avoid crashing your armoured warhorse and your armoured self into another man and horse coming at full gallop the other way. Some men don’t swerve, but instead they close their eyes at the moment of impact. These men are of two kinds: the ones who know they do it and can’t help it, and the ones who don’t know they do it. Get your boys to watch you when you practise. Be neither of these kinds of men.

So how shall I improve, he said to the old knight, how shall I succeed? These were his instructions: you must sit easily in your saddle, as if you were riding out to take the air. Hold your reins loosely, but have your horse collected. In the combat a plaisance, with its fluttering flags, its garlands, its rebated swords and lances tipped with buffering coronals, ride as if you were out to kill. In the combat a l’outrance, kill as if it were a sport. Now look, the knight said, and slapped the table, here’s what I’ve seen, more times than I care to count: your man braces himself for the atteint, and at that final moment, the urgency of desire undoes him: he tightens his muscles, he pulls in his lance-arm against his body, the tip tilts up, and he’s off the mark; if you avoid one fault, avoid that. Carry your lance a little loose, so when you tense your frame and draw in your arm your point comes exactly on the target. But remember this above all: defeat your instinct. Your love of glory must conquer your will to survive; or why fight at all? Why not be a smith, a brewer, a wool merchant? Why are you in the contest, if not to win, and if not to win, then to die?

The next day he saw the knight again. He, Tommaso, was coming back from drinking with his friend Karl Heinz, and when they spotted the old man he was lying with his head on terra firma, his feet in the water; in Venice at dusk, it can so easily be the other way around. They pulled him on to the bank and turned him over. I know this man, he said. His friend said, who owns him? Nobody owns him, but he curses in German, therefore let us take him to the German House, for I myself am staying not at the Tuscan House but with a man