he had been pulled apart, to look at himself in sections, digit by digit. Hans has made his skin smooth as the skin of a courtesan, but the motion he has captured, that folding of the fingers, is as sure as that of a slaughterman's when he picks up the killing knife. He is wearing the cardinal's turquoise.
He had a turquoise ring of his own, one time, which Liz gave to him when Gregory was born. It was a ring in the shape of a heart.
He raises his eyes, to his own face. It does not much improve on the Easter egg which Jo painted. Hans had penned him in a little space, pushing a heavy table to fasten him in. He had time to think, while Hans drew him, and his thoughts took him far off, to another country. You cannot trace those thoughts behind his eyes.
He had asked to be painted in his garden. Hans said, the very notion makes me sweat. Can we keep it simple, yes?
He wears his winter clothes. Inside them, he seems made of a more impermeable substance than most men, more compacted. He could well be wearing armour. He foresees the day when he might have to. There are men in this realm and abroad (not only in Yorkshire now) who would stab him as soon as look at him.
I doubt, he thinks, they can hack through to the heart. The king had said, what are you made of?
He smiles. There is no trace of a smile on the face of his painted self.
‘Right.’ He sweeps into the next room. ‘You can come and see it.’
They crowd in, jostling. There is a short, appraising silence. It lengthens. Alice says, ‘He has made you look rather stout, Uncle. More than he need.’
Richard says, ‘As Leonardo has demonstrated to us, a curved surface better deflects the impact of cannon balls.’
‘I don't think you look like that,’ Helen Barre says. ‘I see that your features are true enough. But that is not the expression on your face.’
Rafe says, ‘No, Helen, he saves it for men.’
Thomas Avery says, ‘The Emperor's man is here, can he come in and have a look?’
‘He is welcome, as always.’
Chapuys prances in. He positions himself before the painting; he skips forward; he leaps back. He is wearing marten furs over silks. ‘Dear God,’ Johane says behind her hand, ‘he looks like a dancing monkey.’
‘Oh no, I fear not,’ Eustache says. ‘Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Your Protestant painter has missed the mark this time. For one never thinks of you alone, Cremuel, but in company, studying the faces of other people, as if you yourself mean to paint them. You make other men think, not “what does he look like?” but “what do I look like?”’ He whisks away, then swings around, as if to catch the likeness in the act of moving. ‘Still. Looking at that, one would be loath to cross you. To that extent, I think Hans has achieved his aim.’
When Gregory comes home from Canterbury, he takes him in alone to see the painting, still in his riding coat, muddy from the road; he wants to hear his son's opinion, before the rest of the household get to him. He says, ‘Your lady mother always said she didn't pick me for my looks. I was surprised, when the picture came, to find I was vain. I thought of myself as I was when I left Italy, twenty years ago. Before you were born.’
Gregory stands at his shoulder. His eyes rest on the portrait. He doesn't speak.
He is conscious that his son is taller than he is: not that it takes much. He steps sideways, though only in his mind, to see his boy with a painter's eye: a boy with fine white skin and hazel eyes, a slender angel of the second rank in a fresco dappled with damp, in some hill town far from here. He thinks of him as a page in a forest riding across vellum, dark curls crisp under a narrow band of gold; whereas the young men about him every day, the young men of Austin Friars, are muscled like fighting dogs, hair cropped to stubble, eyes sharp as sword points. He thinks, Gregory is all he should be. He is everything I have a right to hope for: his openness, his gentleness, the reserve and consideration with which he holds back his thoughts till he has framed them. He feels such tenderness for him he thinks he might cry.
He turns to the painting. ‘I fear Mark was right.’
‘Who is Mark?’
‘A silly little boy who runs after George Boleyn. I once heard him say I looked like a murderer.’
Gregory says, ‘Did you not know?’
PART SIX
Chapter I.
Supremacy.
In the convivial days between Christmas and New Year, while the court is feasting and Charles Brandon is in the fens shouting at a door, he is rereading Marsiglio of Padua. In the year 1324 Marsiglio put to us forty-two propositions. When the feast of the Epiphany is past, he ambles along to put a few of them to Henry.
Some of these propositions the king knows, some are strange to him. Some are congenial, in his present situation; some have been denounced to him as heresy. It's a morning of brilliant, bone-chilling cold, the wind off the river like a knife in the face. We are breezing in to push our luck.
Marsiglio tells us that when Christ came into this world he came not as a ruler or a judge, but as a subject: subject to the state as he found it. He did not seek to rule, nor pass on to his disciples a mission to rule. He did not give power to one of his followers more than another; if you think he did, read again those verses about Peter. Christ did not make Popes. He did not give his followers the power to make laws or levy taxes, both of which churchmen have claimed as their right.
Henry says, ‘I never remember the cardinal spoke of this.’
‘Would you, if you were a cardinal?’
Since Christ did not induce his followers into earthly power, how can it be maintained that the princes of today derive their power from the Pope? In fact, all priests are subjects, as Christ left them. It is for the prince to govern the bodies of his citizens, to say who is married and who can marry, who is a bastard and who legitimate.
Where does the prince get this power, and his power to enforce the law? He gets it through a legislative body, which acts on behalf of the citizens. It is from the will of the people, expressed in Parliament, that a king derives his kingship.
When he says this, Henry seems to be straining his ears, as if he might catch the sound of the people coming down the road to turn him out of his palace. He reassures him on the point: Marsiglio gives no legitimacy to rebels. Citizens may indeed band together to overthrow a despot, but he, Henry, is not a despot; he is a monarch who rules within the law. Henry likes the people to cheer him as he rides through London, but the wise prince is not always the most popular prince; he knows this.
He has other propositions to put to him. Christ did not bestow on his followers grants of land, or monopolies, offices, promotions. All these things are the business of the secular power. A man who has taken vows of poverty, how can he have property rights? How can monks be landlords?
The king says, ‘Cromwell, with your facility for large numbers …’ He stares into the distance. His fingers pick at the silver lacing of his cuff.
‘The legislative body,’ he says, ‘should provide for the maintenance of priests and bishops. After that, it should be able to use the church's wealth for the public good.’
‘But how to free it,’ Henry says. ‘I suppose shrines can be broken.’ Gem-studded himself, he thinks of the kind of wealth you can weigh. ‘If there were any who dared.’
It is a characteristic of Henry, to run before you to where you were not quite going. He had meant to gentle him towards an intricate legal process of dispossession, repossession: the assertion of ancient sovereign rights, the taking back of what was always yours. He will remember that it was Henry who first suggested picking up a chisel and gouging the sapphire eyes out of saints. But he is willing to follow the king's thought. ‘Christ taught us
