ambassador, and to the Pole family, who are as papist as they dare to be, who have teetered on the edge of treason these last four years. No one is talking to the French ambassador. But everyone is talking to him, Thomas Cromwell.
In sum, this is the question his new friends are asking: if Henry can retire one wife, and she a daughter of Spain, can he not give a pension to Boleyn’s daughter and put her away in some country house, having found defects in the marriage documents? His casting off of Katherine, after twenty years of marriage, offended all Europe. The marriage with Anne is recognised nowhere but in this realm, and has not endured three years; he could annul it, as a folly. After all, he has his own church to do so, his own archbishop.
In his head he rehearses a request. ‘Sir Nicholas? Sir William? Will you come to my humble house to dine?’
He does not really mean to ask them. Word would soon reach the queen. A coded glance is enough, a nod and a wink. But once again in his mind he sets the table.
Norfolk at the head. Montague and his sainted mother. Courtenay and his blasted wife. Sliding in behind them, our friend Monsieur Chapuys. ‘Oh, dammit,’ Norfolk sulks, ‘now must we speak French?’
‘I will translate,’ he offers. But who’s this clattering in? It’s Duke Dishpan. ‘Welcome, my lord Suffolk,’ he says. ‘Take a seat. Careful not to get crumbs in that great beard of yours.’
‘If there were a crumb.’ Norfolk is hungry.
Margaret Pole spears him with a glacial stare. ‘You have set a table. You have given us all seats. You have given us no napery.’
‘My apologies.’ He calls for a servant. ‘You wouldn’t want to get your hands dirty.’
Margaret Pole shakes out her napkin. On it is imprinted the face of the dead Katherine.
A bawling comes from without, the direction of the buttery. Francis Bryan reels in, already a bottle to the good. ‘
Now he, Cromwell, nods to his menials. Extra stools are fetched. ‘Squeeze them in,’ he says.
Carew and Fitzwilliam enter. They take their places without a smile or a nod. They have come ready to the feast, their knives in their hands.
He looks around at his guests. All are prepared. A Latin grace; English would be his choice, but he will suit his company. Who cross themselves ostentatiously, in papist style. Who look at him, expectant.
He shouts for the waiters. The doors burst open. Sweating men heave the platters to the table. It seems the meat is fresh, in fact not slaughtered yet.
It is just a minor breach of etiquette. The company must sit and salivate.
The Boleyns are laid at his hand to be carved.
Now that Rafe is in the privy chamber, he has closer acquaintance with the musician, Mark Smeaton, who has been promoted among the grooms. When Mark first showed himself at the cardinal’s door, he sloped up in patched boots and a canvas doublet that had belonged to a bigger man. The cardinal put him into worsted, but since he joined the royal household he goes in damask, perched on a fine gelding with a saddle of Spanish leather, the reins clutched in gold-fringed gloves. Where is the money coming from? Anne is recklessly generous, Rafe says. The gossip is that she has given Francis Weston a sum to keep his creditors at bay.
You can understand, Rafe says, that because now the king does not admire the queen so much, she is keen to have young men about her who hang on her words. Her rooms are busy thoroughfares, the privy chamber gentlemen constantly calling in on this errand or that, and lingering to play a game or share a song; where there is no message to carry, they invent one.
Those gentlemen who are less in the queen’s favour are keen to talk to the newcomer and give him all the gossip. And some things he doesn’t need to be told, he can see and hear for himself. Whispering and scuffling behind doors. Covert mockery of the king. Of his clothes, of his music. Hints of his shortcomings in bed. Where would those hints come from, but the queen?
There are some men who talk all the time about their horses. This is a steady mount but I used to have one speedier; that’s a fine filly you have there, but you should see this bay I have my eye on. With Henry, it’s ladies: he finds something to like in almost any female who crosses his path, and will scratch up a compliment for her, though she be plain and old and sour. With the young ones, he is enraptured twice a day: has she not the finest eyes, is not her throat white, her voice sweet, her hand shapely? Generally it’s look and don’t touch: the most he will venture, blushing slightly, ‘Don’t you think she must have pretty little duckies?’
One day Rafe hears Weston’s voice in the next room, running on, amused, in imitation of the king: ‘Has she not the wettest cunt you ever groped?’ Giggles, complicit sniggers. And ‘Hush! Cromwell’s spy is about.’
Harry Norris has been absent from court lately, spending time on his own estates. When he is on duty, Rafe says, he tries to suppress the talk, sometimes seems angry at it; but sometimes he lets himself smile. They talk about the queen and they speculate…
Go on, Rafe, he says.
Rafe doesn’t like telling this. He feels it is below him to be an eavesdropper. He thinks hard before he speaks. ‘The queen needs to conceive another child quickly to please the king, but where is it to come from, they ask. Since Henry cannot be trusted to do the business, which of them is to do him a favour?’
‘Did they come to any conclusion?’
Rafe rubs the crown of his head and makes his hair stand up. You know, he says, they would not really do it. None of them. The queen is sacred. It is too great a sin even for such lustful men as they be, and they are too much in fear of the king, surely, even though they mock him. Besides, she would not be so foolish.
‘I ask you again, did they come to any conclusion?’
‘I think it’s every man for himself.’
He laughs. ‘
He hopes none of this will be needed. If he acts against Anne he hopes for a cleaner way. It’s all foolish talk. But Rafe cannot unhear it, he cannot unknow it, there it is.
March weather, April weather, icy showers and splinters of sun; he meets Chapuys, indoors, this time.
‘You seem pensive, Master Secretary. Come to the fire.’
He shakes away the raindrops from his hat. ‘I have a weight on my mind.’
‘Do you know, I think you only set up these meetings with me to annoy the French ambassador?’
‘Oh yes,’ he sighs, ‘he is very jealous. In truth I would visit you more often, except that word always gets back to the queen. And she contrives to use it against me in one way or another.’
‘I could wish you a more gracious mistress.’ The ambassador’s implicit question: how is that going, the getting of a new mistress? Chapuys has floated to him, could there not be a new treaty between our sovereigns? Something that would safeguard Mary, her interests, perhaps place her back in the line of succession, after any children Henry might have with a new wife? Assuming, of course, the present queen were gone?
‘Ah, Lady Mary.’ Lately he has taken to putting his hand to his hat when her name is mentioned. He can see the ambassador is touched by this, he can see him preparing to put it in dispatches. ‘The king is willing to hold formal talks. It would please him to be united in friendship to the Emperor. So much he has said.’
‘Now you must bring him to the point.’
‘I have influence with the king but I cannot answer for him, no subject can. This is my difficulty. To succeed with him, one must anticipate his desires. But one then stands exposed, should he change his mind.’
Wolsey his master had advised, make him say what he wants, do not guess, for by guessing you may destroy yourself. But perhaps, since Wolsey’s day, the king’s unexpressed commands have become harder to ignore. He fills the room with a seething discontent, stares up into the sky when you ask him to sign a paper: as if he were expecting deliverance.
‘You fear he will turn on you,’ Chapuys says.
‘He will, I suppose. One day.’
Sometimes he wakes in the night and thinks of it. There are courtiers who have honourably retired. He can think of instances. Of course, it is the other kind that loom larger, if you are wakeful around midnight. ‘But if that day comes,’ the ambassador says, ‘what will you do?’
‘What can I do? Arm myself with patience and leave the rest to God.’ And hope the end is quick.
‘Your piety does you credit,’ Chapuys says. ‘If fortune turns against you, you will need friends. The Emperor
