Bring Up the Bodies

enough.’

It is a warm evening, and he sits by an open window, his nephew Richard for company. Richard knows when to keep silence and when to talk; it is a family trait, he supposes. Rafe Sadler is the only other company he would have liked, and Rafe is with the king.

Richard looks up. ‘I had a letter from Gregory.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘You know Gregory’s letters.’

‘“The sun is shining. We have had good hunting and great cheer. I am well, how are you? And now no more for lack of time.”’

Richard nods. ‘He doesn’t change, Gregory. Though he does, I suppose. He wants to come here to you. He should be with you, he thinks.’

‘I was trying to spare him.’

‘I know. But perhaps you should let him. You cannot keep him a child.’

He broods. If his son is to become accustomed to the king’s service, perhaps he should know what it involves. ‘You can leave me,’ he says to Richard. ‘I might write to him.’

Richard pauses to shut out the night air. Outside the door his voice runs on, giving kindly commands: bring down my uncle’s furred gown, he may want it, and take in to him more lights. He is sometimes surprised if he knows someone cares for him, cares enough to think of his bodily comfort: except for his servants, who are paid to do it. He wonders how the queen finds herself, amid her new Tower household: Lady Kingston has been set among her attendants, and though he has placed women of the Boleyn family around her, they might not be those she would have chosen for herself. They are women of experience, who will know how the tide is running. They will listen keenly to weeping and laughter, and any words like, ‘It is too good for me.’

He believes he understands Anne, as Wriothesley does not. When she said the queen’s lodgings were too good for her, she did not mean to admit her guilt, but to say this truth: I am not worthy, and I am not worthy because I have failed. One thing she set out to do, this side of salvation: get Henry and keep him. She has lost him to Jane Seymour, and no court of law will judge her more harshly than she judges herself. Since Henry rode away from her yesterday, she has been an impostor, like a child or a court fool, dressed in the costumes of a queen and now ordered to live in the queen’s rooms. She knows adultery is a sin and treason a crime, but to be on the losing side is a greater fault than these.

Richard puts his head back in and says, ‘Your letter, shall I write it for you? Save your eyes?’

He says, ‘Anne is dead to herself. We shall have no trouble with her now.’

* * *

He has asked the king to keep to his privy chamber, admit as few people as possible. He has strictly instructed the guards to turn away petitioners, whether men or women. He does not want the king’s judgement contaminated, as it can be, by the last person he talked to; he does not want Henry persuaded or cajoled or pushed off course. Henry seems inclined to obey him. These last years, the king has tended to retire from public view: at first because he wanted to be with his concubine Anne, and then because he wanted to be without her. Behind his privy chamber, he has his secret lodgings; and sometimes, after he has been put into his great bed and the bed has been blessed, after the candles have been snuffed, he pushes away the damask counterpane and slides from the mattress and pads into a secret chamber, where he creeps into another, unofficial bed, and sleeps like a natural man, naked and alone.

So it is in the muffled silence of these secret rooms, hung with tapestries of the Fall of Man, that the king says to him, ‘Cranmer has sent a letter from Lambeth. Read it to me, Cromwell. I have had it read once, but do you read it again.’

He takes the paper. You can feel Cranmer shrinking as he writes, hoping the ink will run and the words blur. Anne the queen has favoured him, Anne has listened to him and promoted the cause of the gospel; Anne has made use of him, too, but Cranmer can never see that. ‘“I am in such perplexity,” he writes, “that my mind is clean amazed; for I never had better opinion in woman, than I had in her.”’

Henry interrupts him. ‘See how we were all deceived.’

‘“…which maketh me to think,”’ he reads, ‘“that she should not be culpable. And again, I think your Highness would not have gone so far, except she had surely been culpable.”’

‘Wait till he hears it all,’ Henry says. ‘He will not have heard the like. At least, I hope he has not. I do not think there has ever been an instance in the world like this.’

‘“Now I think that your Grace best knoweth, that next unto your Grace I was most bound unto her of all creatures living…”’

Henry breaks in again. ‘But you will see he goes on to say, if she is culpable she should be punished without mercy, and held for an example. Seeing how I raised her from nothing. And further he says, that no one who loves the gospel will favour her, rather hate her.’

Cranmer adds, ‘Wherefore I trust that your Grace will bear no less entire favour unto the truth of the gospel, than you did before forsomuch as your grace’s favour to the gospel was not led by affection unto her, but by zeal unto the truth.’

He, Cromwell, puts the letter down. That seems to cover everything. She cannot be guilty. But yet she must be guilty. We, her brethren, repudiate her.

He says, ‘Sir, if you want Cranmer, send for him. You could comfort each other, and perhaps between you try to understand all this. I will tell your people to let him in. You look as if you need fresh air. Go down the stair into the privy garden. You will not be disturbed.’

‘But I have not seen Jane,’ Henry says. ‘I want to look at her. We can bring her here?’

‘Not yet, sir. Wait till the business is more forward. There are rumours on the streets, and crowds who want to see her, and ballads made, deriding her.’

‘Ballads?’ Henry is shocked. ‘Find out the authors. They must be straitly punished. No, you are right, we must not bring Jane here until the air is pure. So you go to her, Cromwell. I want you to carry a certain token.’ He produces from among his papers a tiny, jewelled book: the kind a woman keeps at her girdle, looped on a gold chain. ‘It was my wife’s,’ he says. Then he checks himself and looks away in shame. ‘I mean to say, it was Katherine’s.’

He does not want to take the time to go down to Surrey to Carew’s house, but it seems he must. It is a well-proportioned house put up some thirty years ago, its great hall especially splendid and much copied by gentlemen building their own houses. He has been there before, with the cardinal in his time. It looks as though since then Carew has brought Italians in to replan the gardens. The gardeners doff their straw hats to him. The walks are coming into their early summer glory. Birds twitter from an aviary. The grass is shorn as close as velvet pile. Nymphs watch him with stone eyes.

Now that the business is tending one way and one way only, the Seymours have begun teaching Jane how to be a queen. ‘This business you get up to with doors,’ Edward Seymour says. Jane blinks at him. ‘The way you hold the door still and slide yourself around it.’

‘You told me to be discreet.’ Jane lowers her eyes, to show him what discretion means.

‘Now. Go out of the room,’ Edward says. ‘Come back in. Like a queen, Jane.’

Jane sneaks out. The door creaks behind her. In the hiatus, they look at each other. The door swings open. There is a long pause – as it might be, a regal pause. The doorway stands empty. Then Jane appears, inching around the corner. ‘Is that better?’

‘Do you know what I think?’ he says. ‘I think that from now on Jane won’t be opening her own doors, so it doesn’t matter.’

‘My belief is,’ Edward says, ‘this modesty could pall. Look up at me, Jane. I want to see your expression.’

‘But what makes you think,’ Jane murmurs, ‘that I want to see yours?’

In the gallery the whole family is assembled. The two brothers, prudent Edward and hasty Tom. Worthy Sir John, the old goat. Lady Margery, the noted beauty of her day, about whom John Skelton once penned a line: ‘benign, courteous and meek’, he called her. The meekness is not evident today: she looks grimly triumphant, like