Bring Up the Bodies (47 page)

Master Wriothesley gapes at him. He follows, uttering broken syllables. What? When? Why? Only when they are on horseback does he speak to the purpose. ‘God strike me. You would have been the king's brother-in-law.'

‘But not for much longer,' he says.

The day is breezy and fine. They make good speed back to London. In other days, in other company, he would have enjoyed the journey.

But what company would that be, he wonders, dismounting at Whitehall. Bess Seymour's? ‘Master Wriothesley,' he asks, ‘can you read my mind?'

‘No,' says Call-Me. He looks baffled, and somehow affronted.

‘Do you think a bishop could read my mind?'

‘No, sir.'

He nods. ‘Just as well.'

 

The Imperial ambassador comes to see him, wearing his Christmas hat. ‘Especially for you, Thomas,' he says, ‘because I know it makes you happy.' He sits down, signals to the servant for wine. The servant is Christophe. ‘Do you use this ruffian for every purpose?' Chapuys asks. ‘Is it not he who tortured the boy Mark?'

‘Firstly, Mark is not a boy, he is only immature. Secondly, no one tortured him.' At least, he says, ‘not in my sight or hearing, not at my command nor suggestion, nor with my permission, expressed or implied'.

‘I feel you preparing yourself for the courtroom,' Chapuys says. ‘A knotted rope, was it not? Tightened around the brow? So you threatened to pop out his eyes?'

He is angry. ‘This may be what they do where you were brought up. I have never heard of such a practice.'

‘So it was the rack instead?'

‘You can see him at his trial. You can judge for yourself whether he is damaged. I have seen men who have been racked. Not here. Abroad, I have seen it. They have to be carried in a chair. Mark is as nimble as in his dancing days.'

‘If you say so.' Chapuys seems pleased to have provoked him. ‘And how is your heretic queen now?'

‘Brave as a lion. You will be sorry to learn.'

‘And proud, but she will be humbled. She is no lion, and no more than one of your London cats that sing on rooftops.'

He thinks of a black cat he used to have. Marlinspike. After some years of fighting and scavenging he ran off, as cats do, to make his career elsewhere. Chapuys says, ‘As you know, a number of ladies and gentlemen of the court have ridden up to the Princess Mary, to assure her of their services in the time which is at hand. I thought you might go yourself.'

God damn it, he thinks, I am already fully employed, and more than fully; it is no small enterprise, to bring down a queen of England. He says, ‘I trust the princess will forgive my absence at this time. It is to do her good.'

‘You have no trouble calling her “the princess” now,' Chapuys observes. ‘She will be reinstated, of course, as Henry's heir.' He waits. ‘She expects, all her loyal supporters expect, the Emperor himself expects…'

‘Hope is a great virtue. But,' he adds, ‘I hope you will warn her not to receive any persons without permission from the king. Or from me.'

‘She cannot stop them resorting to her. All her old household. They flock. It will be a new world, Thomas.'

‘The king will be eager, is eager, for a reconciliation with her. He is a good father.'

‘A pity he has not had more opportunity to show it.'

‘Eustache…' He pauses, waves Christophe away. ‘I know you have never married, but have you no children? Do not look so startled. I am curious about your life. We must come to know each other better.'

The ambassador bristles at the change of topic. ‘I do not meddle with women. Not like you.'

‘I would not turn away a child. No one ever makes a claim on me. If they did, I would meet it.'

‘The ladies do not wish to prolong the encounter,' Chapuys suggests.

That makes him laugh. ‘You may be right. Come, my good friend, let us have our supper.'

‘I look forward to many more such convivial evenings,' the ambassador says, beaming. ‘Once the concubine is dead, and England is at ease.'

The men in the Tower, though they lament their likely fate, do not complain as sorely as the king does. By day he walks around like an illustration from the Book of Job. By night he glides down the river, accompanied by musicians, to visit Jane.

For all the beauties of Nicholas Carew's house, it is eight miles from the Thames and so not convenient for evening journeys, even in these light nights of early summer; the king wants to stay with Jane till darkness falls. So the queen-in-waiting has come up to London, to be housed by her supporters and friends. Crowds surge about from one rumoured spot to another, trying to catch a glimpse of her, necks craning, eyes popping, the curious blocking gateways and hoisting each other up on walls.

Her brothers throw out largesse to the Londoners, in the hope of winning their voices for her. The word is put about that she is an English gentlewoman, one of our own; unlike Anne Boleyn, whom many believe to be French. But the crowds are puzzled, even rancorous: ought not the king to marry a great princess, like Katherine, from a faraway land?

Bess Seymour tells him, ‘Jane is squirrelling away money in a locked chest, in case the king changes his mind.'

‘So should we all. A locked chest is a good thing to have.'

‘She keeps the key in her bosom,' Bess says.

‘No one is likely to come at it there.'

Bess gives him a merry look, out of the tail of her eye.

By now, the news of Anne's arrest is beginning to ripple through Europe, and though Bess does not know it, offers for Henry are coming in hour by hour. The Emperor suggests that the king might like his niece the Infanta of Portugal, who would come with 400,000 ducats; and the Portuguese Prince Dom Luis could marry the Princess Mary. Or if the king does not want the Infanta, what would he say to the dowager Duchess of Milan, a very pretty young widow, who would bring him a good sum also?

These are days of omens and portents for those who value such things and can read them. The malign stories have come out of the books and are enacting themselves. A queen is locked in a tower, accused of incest. The commonwealth, nature herself, is perturbed. Ghosts are glimpsed in doorways, standing by windows, against walls, hoping to overhear the secrets of the living. A bell rings of itself, touched by no human hand. There is a burst of speech where no one is present, a hissing in the air like the sound of a hot iron plunged into water. Sober citizens are moved to shout in church. A woman pushes through the crowd at his gate, grabbing at the bridle of his horse. Before the guards force her away, she shouts at him, ‘God help us, Cromwell, what a man the king is! How many wives does he mean to have?'

For once, Jane Seymour has a blush of colour in her cheeks; or perhaps it is reflected from her gown, the soft clear rose of quince jelly.

 

Statements, indictments, bills are circulated, shuffled between judges, prosecutors, the Attorney General, the Lord Chancellor's office; each step in the process clear, logical, and designed to create corpses by due process of law. George Rochford will be tried apart, as a peer; the commoners will be tried first. The order goes to the Tower, ‘Bring up the bodies.' Deliver, that is, the accused men, by name Weston, Brereton, Smeaton and Norris, to Westminster Hall for trial. Kingston fetches them by barge; it is 12 May, a Friday. They are brought in by armed guards through a fulminating crowd, shouting the odds. The gamblers believe that Weston will get off; this is his family's campaign at work. But for the others, the odds are even that they live or die. For Mark Smeaton, who has admitted everything, no wagers are being taken; but a book is open on whether he will be hanged, beheaded, boiled or burned, or subject to some novel penalty of the king's invention.

They do not understand the law, he says to Riche, looking down from a window at the scenes below. There is only one penalty for high treason: for a man, to be hanged, cut down alive and eviscerated, or for a woman, to be burned. The king may vary the sentence to decapitation; only poisoners are boiled alive. The court can give just the one sentence in this case, and it will be transmitted from the court to the crowds, and misunderstood, so that those who have won will be gnashing their teeth, and those who have lost will be demanding their money, and there will be fights and torn clothes and smashed heads, and blood on the ground while the accused are still safe in the courtroom, and days away from death.

They will not hear the charges till they hear them in court and, as is usual in treason trials, they will have no legal representation. But they will have a chance to speak, and represent themselves, and they can call witnesses: if anybody will stand up for them. Men have been tried for treason, these last few years, and walked free, but these men know they will not escape. They have to think of their families left behind; they want the king to be good to them and that alone should still any protest, prevent any strident pleas of innocence. The court must be allowed to work unimpeded. In return for their cooperation it is understood, more or less understood, that the king will grant them the mercy of death by the axe, which will not add to their shame; though there are murmurs among the jurors that Smeaton will hang because, being a man of low birth, he has no honour to protect.

Norfolk presides. When the prisoners are brought in, the three gentlemen draw away from Mark; they want to show him their scorn, and how they are better than he. But this brings them into proximity with each other, more than they will allow; they will not look at each other, he notices, they shuffle to create as much space as they can, so they seem to be shrinking from each other, twitching at coats and sleeves. Only Mark will declare his guilt. He has been kept in irons in case he tries to destroy himself: surely a charity, as he would bungle it. So he arrives before the court intact, as promised, no marks of injury, but unable to keep himself from tears. He pleads for mercy. The other defendants are succinct but respectful to the court: three heroes of the tilting ground who see, bearing down on them, the indefeasible opponent, the King of England himself. There are challenges they could make, but the charges, their dates and their details, go by them so fast. They can win a point, if they insist; but it only slows the inevitable, and they know it. When they go in, the guards stand with halberds reversed; but when they come out, convicted, the axe edge is turned to them. They push through the uproar, dead men: hustled through the lines of halberdiers to the river, and back to their temporary home, their anteroom, to write their last letters and make spiritual preparations. All have expressed contrition, though none but Mark has said for what.

 

A cool afternoon: and once the crowds have drifted off, and the court broken up, he finds himself sitting by an open window with the clerks bundling the records, and he watches it done, and then says, I will go home now. I am going to my city house, to Austin Friars, send the papers to Chancery Lane. He is the overlord of the spaces and the silences, the gaps and the erasures, what is missed or misconstrued or simply mistranslated, as the news slips from English to French and perhaps via Latin to Castilian and the Italian tongues, and through Flanders to the Emperor's eastern territories, over the borders of the German principalities and out to Bohemia and Hungary and the snowy realms beyond, by merchantmen under sail to Greece and the Levant; to India, where they have never heard of Anne Boleyn, let alone her lovers and her brother; along the silk routes to China where they have never heard of Henry the eighth of that name, or any other Henry, and even the existence of England is to them a dark myth, a place where men have their mouths in their bellies and women can fly, or cats rule the commonwealth and men crouch at mouse holes to catch their dinner. In the hall at Austin Friars he stands for a moment before the great image of Solomon and Sheba; the tapestry belonged to the cardinal once, but the king took it, and then, after Wolsey was dead, and he, Cromwell, had risen in favour, the king had made him a gift of it, as if embarrassed, as if slipping back to its true owner something that should never have been away. The king had seen him look with longing, and more than once, at Sheba's face, not because he covets a queen but because she takes him back to his past, to a woman whom by accident she resembles: Anselma, an Antwerp widow, whom he might have married, he often thinks, if he had not made up his mind suddenly to take himself off back to England and pick up with his own people. In those days he did things suddenly: not without calculation, not without care, but once his mind was made up he was swift to move. And he is still the same man. As his opponents will find.

‘Gregory?' His son is still in his riding coat, dusty from the road. He hugs him. ‘Let me look at you. Why are you here?'

‘You did not say I must not come,' Gregory explains. ‘You did not absolutely forbid it. Besides, I have learned the art of public speaking now. Do you want to hear me make a speech?'