‘Now Katherine is gone.’
Chapuys does not argue with that. He just winds his cloak closer about him. ‘The king has got no good of the concubine, and will get none now. No power in Europe recognises his marriage. Even the heretics do not recognise it, though she has done her best to make friends of them. What profit can there be to you, in keeping matters as they are: the king unhappy, Parliament fretful, the nobility fractious, the whole country revolted by the woman’s pretensions?’
Slow drops of rain have begun to fall: ponderous, icy. Chapuys glances up again irritably, as if God were undermining him at this crucial point. Taking a grip on the ambassador once more, he tows him over the rough ground towards shelter. The builders have put up a canopy, and he turns them out, saying, ‘Give us a minute, boys, will you?’ Chapuys huddles by the brazier, and grows confidential. ‘I hear the king talks of witchcraft,’ he whispers. ‘He says that he was seduced into the marriage by certain charms and false practices. I see he does not confide in you. But he has spoken to his confessor. If this is so, if he entered into the match in a state of entrancement, then he might find he is not married at all, and free to take a new wife.’
He gazes over the ambassador’s shoulder. Look, he says, this is how it will be: in a year these damp and freezing spaces will be inhabited rooms. His hand sketches the line of the jettied upper storeys, the glazed bays.
Inventories for this project: lime and sand, oak timbers and special cements, spades and shovels, baskets and ropes, tackets, pin nails, roof nails, lead pipes; tiles yellow and tiles blue, window locks, latches, bolts and hinges, iron door handles in the shape of roses; gilding, painting, 2 lb. of frankincense to perfume the new rooms; 6d per day per labourer, and the cost of candles for labour by night.
‘My friend,’ Chapuys says, ‘Anne is desperate and dangerous. Strike first, before she strikes you. Remember how she brought down Wolsey.’
His past lies about him like a burnt house. He has been building, building, but it has taken him years to sweep up the mess.
At the Rolls House, he finds his son, who is packing to go away for the next phase of his education. ‘Gregory, you know St Uncumber? You say that women pray to her to be rid of useless husbands. Now, is there a saint that men can pray to if they wish to be quit of their wives?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Gregory is shocked. ‘The women pray because they have no other means. A man can consult a cleric to find why the marriage is not licit. Or he can chase her away and pay her money to stay in a separate house. As the Duke of Norfolk pays his wife.’
He nods. ‘That’s very helpful, Gregory.’
Anne Boleyn comes up to Whitehall to celebrate the feast of St Matthias with the king. She has changed, all in a season. She is light, starved, she looks as she did in her days of waiting, those futile years of negotiations before he, Thomas Cromwell, came along and cut the knot. Her flamboyant liveliness has faded to something austere, narrow, almost nun-like. But she does not have a nun’s composure. Her fingers play with the jewels at her girdle, tug at her sleeves, touch and retouch the jewels at her throat.
Lady Rochford says, ‘She thought that when she was queen, she would take comfort in going over the days of her coronation, hour by hour. But she says she has forgotten them. When she tries to remember, it’s as if it happened to someone else, and she wasn’t there. She didn’t tell me this, of course. She told brother George.’
From the queen’s rooms comes a dispatch: a prophetess has told her that she will not bear Henry a son while his daughter Mary is alive.
You have to admire it, he says to his nephew. She is on the offensive. She is like a serpent, you do not know when she will strike.
He has always rated Anne highly as a strategist. He has never believed in her as a passionate, spontaneous woman. Everything she does is calculated, like everything he does. He notes, as he has these many years, the careful deployment of her flashing eyes. He wonders what it would take to make her panic.
The king sings:
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
