Wolf Hall: Bring Up the Bodies (23 page)

Yes, and what a fool I was, he thinks, not to get among them and suborn them and advance-bribe them for an occasion such as this; I said I would send my ring for Katherine’s deliverance, but for the princess I made no such arrangement. Let Mary remain in the hands of the Boleyns, and she is dead. Let her fall into the hands of the papists, they will set her up as queen, and I am dead. There will be civil war.

Courtiers are now pouring into the tent, all inventing how Henry died, all exclaiming, denying, lamenting; the noise rises, and he grips Fitz’s arm: ‘If this news gets up-country before we do, we will never see Mary alive.’ Her guardians will not hang her up from the staircase, they will not stab her, but they will make sure she meets with an accident, a broken neck on the road. Then if Anne’s unborn child is a girl, Elizabeth is queen, as we have no other.

Fitzwilliam says, ‘Wait now, let me think. Where is Richmond?’ The king’s bastard, sixteen years old. He is a commodity, he is to be reckoned with, he is to be secured. Richmond is Norfolk’s son-in-law. Norfolk must know where he is, Norfolk is best placed to lay hands on him, bargain with him, lock him up or turn him loose: but he, Cromwell, does not fear a bastard boy, and besides, the young man favours him, in all their dealings he has buttered him like a parsnip.

Norfolk is now buzzing from side to side, a maddened wasp, and as if he were a wasp the onlookers shrink from him, eddying away, then swaying back. The duke buzzes into him; he, Cromwell, bats the duke away. He stares down at Henry. He thinks he has seen, but it might be fantasy, a twitch of an eyelid. It is enough. He stands over Henry, like a figure on a tomb: a broad, mute, ugly guardian. He waits: then he sees that flicker again, he thinks he does. His heart lurches. He puts his hand on the king’s chest, slapping it down, like a merchant closing a deal. Says calmly, ‘The king is breathing.’

There is an unholy roar. It is something between a moan and a cheer and a wail of panic, a shout to God, a riposte to the devil.

Beneath the jacket, within the horsehair padding, a fibrillation, a quiver of life: his hand heavy and flat on the regal breast, he feels he is raising Lazarus. It is as if his palm, magnetised, is drawing life back into his prince. The king’s respiration, though shallow, seems steady. He, Cromwell, has seen the future; he has seen England without Henry; he prays aloud, ‘Long live the king.’

‘Fetch the surgeons,’ he says. ‘Fetch Butts. Fetch any man with skill. If he dies again, they will not be blamed. My word on that. Get me Richard Cromwell my nephew. Fetch a stool for my lord Norfolk, he has had a shock.’ He is tempted to add, throw a bucket of water on Gentle Norris: whose prayers, he has time to notice, are of a marked papist character.

The tent is now so crowded that it seems to have been picked up by its moorings, to be carried on men’s heads. He takes a last look at Henry before his still form disappears under the ministrations of doctors and priests. He hears a long, retching gasp; but one has heard the same from corpses.

‘Breathe,’ Norfolk shouts. ‘Let the king breathe!’ And as if in obedience, the fallen man takes a deep, sucking, scraping breath. And then he swears. And then he tries to sit up.

And it is over.

But not entirely: not until he has studied the Boleyn expressions around. They look numb, bemused. Their faces are pinched in the bitter cold. Their great hour has passed, before they realised it has arrived. How have they all got here so fast? Where have they come from? he asks Fitz. Only then he realises that the light is fading. What felt like ten minutes has been two hours: two hours since Rafe stood in the doorway, and he dropped his pen on the page.

He says to Fitzwilliam, ‘Of course, it never happened. Or if it did, it was an incident of no importance.’

For Chapuys and the other ambassadors, he will stick by his original version: the king fell, hit his head, and was unconscious for ten minutes. No, at no time did we think he was dead. After ten minutes he sat up. And now he is perfectly well.

The way I tell it, he says to Fitzwilliam, you would think that the blow on the head had improved him. That he actually set out to get it. That every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time.

Fitzwilliam is amused. ‘A man’s thoughts at such a time hardly bear scrutiny. I recall thinking, should we not send for the Lord Chancellor? But I don’t know what I thought he was to do.’

‘My thought,’ he confesses, ‘was, somebody get the Archbishop of Canterbury. I think I believed a king couldn’t die without his supervision. Imagine trying to bustle Cranmer across the Thames. He would make you join him in a gospel reading first.’

What does the Black Book say? Nothing to the purpose. No one has made a plan for a king struck down between one moment and the next, one second mounted tall and riding full tilt, next second mashed into the ground. No one dares. No one dares think about it. Where protocol fails, it is war to the knife. He remembers Fitzwilliam beside him; Gregory in the crowd; Rafe by his side, and then Richard his nephew. Was it Richard who helped lever the king upright as he tried to sit, while the doctors cried, ‘No, no, lie him down!’ Henry had clasped his hands to his chest, as if to squeeze his own heart. He had struggled to rise, he had made inarticulate noises, that sounded like words but were not, as if the Holy Ghost had descended upon him and he was speaking in tongues. He had thought, panic darting through him, what if he never makes sense again? What does the Black Book say if a king is rendered simple? Outside he remembers the roaring of Henry’s fallen horse, struggling to rise; but surely that cannot be what he heard, surely they had slaughtered it?

Then Henry himself was roaring. That night, the king rips the bandage from his head. The bruising, the swelling, is God’s verdict on the day. He is determined to show himself to his court, to counter any rumours that he is mauled or dead. Anne approaches him, supported by her father, ‘Monseigneur’. The earl is really supporting her, not pretending to. She looks white and frail; now her pregnancy shows. ‘My lord,’ she says, ‘I pray, the whole of England prays, that you will never joust again.’

Henry beckons her to approach. Beckons her till her face is close to his own. His voice low and vehement: ‘Why not geld me while you are at it? That would suit you, would it not, madam?’

Faces open in shock. The Boleyns have the sense to draw Anne backwards, backwards and away, Mistress Shelton and Jane Rochford flapping and tut-tutting, the whole Howard, Boleyn clan closing around her. Jane Seymour, alone of the ladies, does not move. She stands and looks at Henry and the king’s eyes fly straight to her, a space opens around her and for a moment she stands in the vacancy, like a dancer left behind when the line moves on.

Later he is with Henry in his bedchamber, the king collapsed in a velvet chair. Henry says, when I was a boy, I was walking with my father in a gallery at Richmond, one night in summer about eleven of the clock, he had my arm in his and we were deep in talk or he was: and suddenly there was a great crashing and a splintering, the whole building gave a deep groan, and the floor fell away at our feet. I will remember it all my life, standing on the brink, and the world vanished from beneath us. But for a moment I did not know what I heard, whether it was the timbers splintering or our bones. Both of us by God’s grace still stood on solid ground, and yet I had seen myself plummeting, down and down through the floor below till I hit the earth and smelled it, damp like the grave. Well…when I fell today, that was how it was. I heard voices. Very distant. I could not make out the words. I felt myself borne through the air. I did not see God. Or angels.

‘I hope you were not disappointed when you woke. Only to see Thomas Cromwell.’

‘You were never more welcome,’ Henry says. ‘Your own mother on the day you were born was no gladder to see you than I was today.’

The grooms of the chamber are here, going soft-footed about their usual duties, sprinkling the king’s sheets with holy water. ‘Steady,’ Henry says crossly. ‘Do you want me to take a chill? A drowning is not more efficacious than a drop.’ He turns and says, low-voiced, ‘Crumb, you know this never happened?’

He nods. What records are already made, he is in the process of expunging. Afterwards it will be known that on such a date, the king’s horse stumbled. But God’s hand plucked him from the ground and set him back laughing on his throne. Another item of note, for The Book Called Henry: knock him down and he bounces.

But the queen has a point. You’ve seen these jousters from the old king’s time, limping about the court, the wincing and addle-pated survivors of the lists; men who’ve taken a blow on the head once too often, men who walk crooked, bent like a dog-leg brick. And all your skill counts for nothing when your day of reckoning comes. Horse can fail. Boys can fail. Nerve can fail.

That night he says to Richard Cromwell, ‘It was a bad moment for me. How many men can say, as I must, “I am a man whose only friend is the King of England”? I have everything, you would think. And yet take Henry away and I have nothing.’

Richard sees the helpless truth of it. Says, ‘Yes.’ What else can he say?

Later he voices the same thought, in a cautious and modified form, to Fitzwilliam. Fitzwilliam looks at him: thoughtful, not without sympathy. ‘I don’t know, Crumb. You are not without support, you know.’

‘Forgive me,’ he says sceptically, ‘but in what way does this support manifest?’

‘I mean that you would have support, should you need it against the Boleyns.’

‘Why should I? The queen and I are perfect friends.’

‘That’s not what you tell Chapuys.’

He inclines his head. Interesting, the people who talk to Chapuys; interesting too, what the ambassador chooses to pass on, from one party to another.

‘Did you hear them?’ Fitz says. His tone is disgusted. ‘Outside the tent, when we thought the king was dead? Shouting “Boleyn, Boleyn!” Calling out their own name. Like cuckoos.’

He waits. Of course he heard them; what is the real question here? Fitz is close to the king. He was brought up at court with Henry since they were small boys, though his family is good gentry, not noble. He has been to war. Has had a crossbow bolt in him. Has been abroad on embassies, knows France, knows Calais, the English enclave there and its politics. He is of that select company, the Garter knights. He writes a good letter, to the point, neither abrupt nor circumlocutory, nor larded with flattery, nor cursory in expressions of regard. The cardinal liked him, and he is affable to Thomas Cromwell when they dine daily in the guard chamber. He is always affable: and now more so? ‘What would have happened, Crumb, if the king had not come back to life? I shall never forget Howard pitching in, “Me, me, me!”’

‘It is not a spectacle we will erase from our minds. As for…’ he hesitates, ‘well, if the worst had been, the king’s body dies but the body politic continues. It might be possible to convene a ruling council, made up from the law officers, and from those chief councillors that are now…’

‘…amongst whom, yourself…’

‘Myself, granted.’ Myself in several capacities, he thinks: who more trusted, who closer, and not just Master Secretary but a law officer, Master of the Rolls? ‘If Parliament were willing, we might bring together a body who would have ruled as regent till the queen was delivered, and perhaps with her permission during a minority…’

‘But you know Anne would give no such permission,’ Fitz says.

‘No, she would have all to rule herself. Though she would have to fight Uncle Norfolk. Between the two of them I do not know who I would back. The lady, I think.’

‘God help the realm,’ Fitzwilliam says, ‘and all the men in it. Of the two, I would sooner have Thomas Howard. At least if it came to it, one could challenge him to come outside and fight. Let the lady be regent and the Boleyns would walk on our backs. We would be their living carpet. She would have “AB” sewn into our skins.’ He rubs his chin. ‘But so she will anyway. If she gives Harry a son.’

He is aware that Fitz is watching him. ‘On the topic of sons,’ he says, ‘have I thanked you in proper form? Let me know if there is anything I can do for you. Gregory has thrived under your guidance.’

‘The pleasure is mine. Send him back to me soon.’

I will, he thinks, and with the lease on a little abbey or two, when my new laws are passed. His desk is piled high with business for the new session of Parliament. Before many years are out he would like Gregory to have a seat beside him in the Commons. He must see all aspects of how the realm is governed. A term in Parliament is an exercise in frustration, it is a lesson in patience: whichever way you like to look at it. They commune of war, peace, strife, contention, debate, murmur, grudges, riches, poverty, truth, falsehood, justice, equity, oppression, treason, murder and the edification and continuance of the commonwealth; then do as their predecessors have done – that is, as well as they might – and leave off where they began.

After the king’s accident, everything is the same, yet nothing is the same. He is still on the wrong side of the Boleyns, of Mary’s supporters, the Duke of Norfolk, the Duke of Suffolk, and the absent Bishop of Winchester; not to mention the King of France, the Emperor, and the Bishop of Rome, otherwise known as the Pope. But the contest – every contest – is sharper now.

On the day of Katherine’s funeral, he finds himself downcast. How close we hug our enemies! They are our familiars, our other selves. When she was sitting on a silk cushion at the Alhambra, a seven-year-old working her first embroidery, he was scrubbing roots in the kitchen at Lambeth Palace, under the eye of his uncle John, the cook.

So often in council he has taken Katherine’s part, as if he were one of her appointed lawyers. ‘You make this argument, my lords,’ he has said, ‘but the dowager princess will allege…’ And ‘Katherine will refute you, thus.’ Not because he favours her cause but because it saves time; as her opponent, he enters into her concerns, he judges her stratagems, he reaches every point before she does. It has long been a puzzle to Charles Brandon: ‘Whose side is this fellow on?’ he would demand.