The king sings:
‘My most desire my hand may reach,
My will is always at my hand;
Me need not long for to beseech,
Her that has power me to command.’
So he thinks. He can beseech and beseech, but it has no effect on Jane.
But the nation’s business must go forward, and this is how: an act to give Wales members of Parliament, and make English the language of the law courts, and to cut from under them the powers of the lords of the Welsh marches. An act to dissolve the small monasteries, those houses worth under two hundred pounds a year. An act to set up a Court of Augmentations, a new body to deal with the inflow of revenue from these monasteries: Richard Riche to be its chancellor.
In March, Parliament knocks back his new poor law. It was too much for the Commons to digest, that rich men might have some duty to the poor; that if you get fat, as gentlemen of England do, on the wool trade, you have some responsibility to the men turned off the land, the labourers without labour, the sowers without a field. England needs roads, forts, harbours, bridges. Men need work. It’s a shame to see them begging their bread, when honest labour could keep the realm secure. Can we not put them together, the hands and the task?
But Parliament cannot see how it is the state’s job to create work. Are not these matters in God’s hands, and is not poverty and dereliction part of his eternal order? To everything there is a season: a time to starve and a time to thieve. If rain falls for six months solid and rots the grain in the fields, there must be providence in it; for God knows his trade. It is an outrage to the rich and enterprising, to suggest that they should pay an income tax, only to put bread in the mouths of the workshy. And if Secretary Cromwell argues that famine provokes criminality: well, are there not hangmen enough?
The king himself comes to the Commons to argue for the law. He wants to be Henry the Beloved, a father to his people, a shepherd to his flock. But the Commons sit stony-faced on their benches and stare him out. The wreckage of the measure is comprehensive. ‘It has ended up as an act for the whipping of beggars,’ Richard Riche says. ‘It is more against the poor than for them.’
‘Perhaps we can bring it in again,’ Henry says. ‘In a better year. Do not lose heart, Master Secretary.’
So: there will be better years, will there? He will keep trying; sneak it past them when they’re off their guard, start off the measure in the Lords and face down the opposition…there are ways and ways with Parliament, but there are times he wishes he could kick the members back to their own shires, because he could get on faster without them. He says, ‘If I were king, I would not take it so quietly. I would make them shake in their shoes.’
Richard Riche is Mr Speaker in this Parliament; he says nervously, ‘Don’t incense the king, sir. You know what More used to say. “If the lion knew his own strength, it were hard to rule him.”’
‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘That consoles me mightily, Sir Purse, a text from the grave from that blood-soaked hypocrite. Has he anything else to say about the situation? Because if so I’m going to get his head back off his daughter and boot it up and down Whitehall till he shuts up for good and all.’ He bursts into laughter. ‘The Commons. God rot them. Their heads are empty. They never think higher than their pockets.’
Still, if his fellows in Parliament are worried about their incomes, he is buoyant about his own. Though the lesser monastic houses are to be dissolved, they may apply for exemptions, and all these applications come to him, accompanied by a fee or a pension. The king will not keep all his new lands in his own name, but lease them out, so continual application is made to him, for this place or that, for manors, farms, pasture; each applicant offers him a little something, a one-off payment or an annuity, an annuity that will pass to Gregory in time. It’s the way business has always been done, favours, sweeteners, a timely transfer of funds to secure attention, or a promise of split proceeds: just now there is so much business, so many transactions, so many offers he can hardly, in civility, decline. No man in England works harder than he does. Say what you like about Thomas Cromwell, he offers good value for what he takes. And he’s always ready to lend: William Fitzwilliam, Sir Nicholas Carew, that ageing one- eyed reprobate Francis Bryan.
He gets Sir Francis round and gets him drunk. He, Cromwell, can trust himself; when he was young, he learned to drink with Germans. It’s over a year since Francis Bryan quarrelled with George Boleyn: over what, Francis hardly remembers, but the grudge remains, and until his legs go from under him he is able to act out the more florid bits of the row, standing up and waving his arms. Of his cousin Anne he says, ‘You like to know where you are with a woman. Is she a harlot, or a lady? Anne wants you to treat her like the Virgin Mary, but she also wants you to put your cash on the table, do the business and get out.’
Sir Francis is intermittently pious, as conspicuous sinners tend to be. Lent is here: ‘It is time for you to enter into your yearly frenzy of penitence, is it not?’
Francis pushes up the patch on his blind eye, and rubs the scar tissue; it itches, he explains. ‘Of course,’ he says, ‘Wyatt’s had her.’
He, Thomas Cromwell, waits.
But then Francis puts his head down on the table, and begins to snore.
‘The Vicar of Hell,’ he says thoughtfully. He calls for boys to come in. ‘Take Sir Francis home to his own people. But wrap him up warm, we may need his testimony in the days to come.’
He wonders exactly how much you’d have to leave on the table, for Anne. She’s cost Henry his honour, his peace of mind. To him, Cromwell, she is just another trader. He admires the way she’s laid out her goods. He personally doesn’t want to buy; but there are customers enough.
Now Edward Seymour is promoted into the king’s privy chamber, a singular mark of favour. And the king says to him, ‘I think I should have young Rafe Sadler among my grooms. He is a gentleman born, and a pleasant young man to have near me, and I think it would help you, Cromwell, would it not? Only he is not for ever to be putting papers under my nose.’
Rafe’s wife Helen bursts into tears when she hears the news. ‘He will be away at court,’ she says, ‘for weeks at a time.’
He sits with her in the parlour at Brick Place, consoling her as best he can. ‘This is the best thing that has ever happened for Rafe, I know,’ she says. ‘I am a fool to weep over it. But I cannot bear to be parted from him, nor he from me. When he is late I send men to look along the road. I wish we could be under the same roof every night we live.’
