The king is planning a progress. Essex, then north as far as Hunsdon, to see the little prince.
‘He needs to keep the leg up,’ Cromer says. ‘Can you not talk to him, Lord Cromwell? You are very great with him these days, everybody says.’
‘So they do.’ Does Fitzwilliam sound galled, or is that imagination?
He says, ‘There was a professor at Padua who worked out the recipe for a long life.’
‘I suppose it did not involve jaunting around Essex,’ Cromer says.
‘One must eat the meat of the viper, nutritious and light. And drink blood.’
‘Animal blood?’ Edward Seymour is repelled.
‘No, human. And when you have got your foaming beaker of it, you powder it with gemstones, just as one powders milk with nutmeg. The professor was called to Constantinople, where –’
‘He lived to be 120 and became the Sultan?’ Fitzwilliam asks.
‘Sadly not. He failed in one of his cures and the Ottomans sawed him in half.’
‘St Luke protect us!’ Cromer exclaims.
He thinks, I must be ready for Henry’s death. But how shall I be ready? I cannot imagine.
In the king’s absence, he sits down to new duties. All over the realm our castles are being surveyed and repaired. The king will ride ten miles but his minister’s mind will range three hundred. Fortifying costs money and he has to find it.
Thomas Cranmer comes to see him. ‘Two items, Thomas.’
‘How are you?’ he asks. The archbishop still looks as if he has a pain behind his eyes.
Cranmer puts down his folios: no small talk. ‘First, Mary Fitzroy. Her husband Richmond has been dead a year and she has not had her settlement. The king has said to me, Look here, my lord archbishop, you know the marriage was not consummated? So she and my son were not properly married, and I need not pay out.’
‘And what did you say?’
‘I said, “Of course they were married – in the sight of God and man. You must pay what is due, and do it quickly.” So he sulked.’ Cranmer opens his folio. ‘They say that as his lord father got older, he cared for nothing but money. Henry is going the same way.’
Even the cardinal had his areas of illusion where Henry was concerned. It seems Cranmer has none. Yet he agrees to carry Henry’s conscience, which is burden enough for a whole bench of bishops.
‘Second item, Father Forrest,’ Cranmer says. ‘Katherine’s confessor, when she was queen. He praises all popish ceremonies, and preaches clean contrary to scripture. He has abused the king’s patience these five years and more. Now I fear he must burn. I will bring him to Paul’s Cross. Hugh Latimer begs to preach to him. He believes he can bring the sinner to Christ. And at a hopeful sign, we will unloose his bonds.’ Cranmer’s tone is dry, precise; but his hands shake. ‘I hope he will abjure. He is a man near seventy.’
He has been watching Forrest for years. ‘The king would not trust his penitence. If you do not burn him I will hang him.’
Cranmer says, ‘The council must witness his death. So that the ambassadors note it, so the smoke is smelled in Rome. You yourself must be there. And Bishop Stokesley.’
‘Oh, the Bishop of London will come,’ he says. ‘Never doubt him. He will close his eyes and breathe in the stench, and he will pretend it is you and me and Robert Barnes on the pyre. I do not trust him any more than I trust Stephen Gardiner.’
Gardiner is coming home. He gives such offence to Frenchmen that we dare not keep him as our envoy. The quarrels of great men are copied on the Paris streets. Gardiner’s boys are taunted when they step out of doors: ‘Call yourself fighters? You are timid as mice. You came here with an army, and you let a girl throw you out.’
‘Yes,’ the English boys shout, ‘and we took your witch Joan and burned her, and all your victories did not save her from our fire.’
Joan the Maid was consumed by flame in 1431. You would think they would find a fresher taunt. But even the market wives curse our ambassadors, and throw ordure on their best clothes.
Stephen should learn to be immune to insults, he says. Look at me, I take them as compliments. Norfolk calls me vile blood. The north calls me a heretic and a thief. The eel boy in Putney used to say to me, ‘Yah, Thomas Cromwell, you miserable gibbet-bait, you toss-brain, you remnant, you crumb: your mother died rather than look at you longer.’
As the Duke of Norfolk would say, the old insults are the best.
‘You Irish,’ the eel boy would say, ‘you flying smut from Satan’s forge; I’ll pillock you, I’ll fillet you, I’ll set your hair on fire.’
And in reply he said naught. He never said, ‘I’ll spit you, I’ll stab you, I’ll carve out your bloody beating heart.’
Till, of course, he did.
The king is up-country when news comes of his collapse. He, Cromwell, takes an escort and rides at once.
It crosses his mind, of course: make for the coast before they block the ports. If Henry dies, what friends have you? Whichever way you go you could be stopped on the road. By the Courtenays, if they can move fast, rallying troops for Mary. By Margaret Pole, by her son Montague. By Norfolk, his forces galloping cross-country.
We have been here before, the king dead or near-dead: the tilt yard at Greenwich, January 1536, with Henry shelled of his armour: the roaring of his injured horse, the shouts and prayers, the clamour of denunciation and blame. He feels once again a needle-tip of panic, working under his breastbone.
But at journey’s end only a single figure comes out to greet him: Butts, looking bone-weary: ‘Still alive,’ he says.
‘Lord Jesus.’ He falls from his saddle.
Butts is drying his hands on a linen towel, its hem embroidered with a pattern of periwinkles. ‘His Majesty rose from the table, and then fell under it. We drew him out black in the face, breath short and rapid. He coughed up blood, and I think that saved him, for then he drew breath. You must not go in. He is too weak.’
‘Let me pass,’ he says.
The silken lout Culpeper is hovering around the king, with a knot of physicians and chaplains. He recalls Henry asking once, ‘Why is it that whenever disaster strikes there is a Howard in the room?’
The boy says slyly, ‘We needed you earlier, Lord Cromwell. I heard how at Greenwich the other year, you raised his Majesty from the dead.’
‘I had the honour,’ he says curtly.
Around the king’s person there is a smell of liniment and incense. Henry is propped by a mound of pillows, his bandaged leg bulky beneath a damask cover. His cheeks are fallen in and his colour bad. He blinks: ‘Cromwell, there you are.’ His voice is weak. ‘In your absence, I fear we took a tumble.’
The royal ‘we’. No other person was involved.
‘Have you any letters from Wyatt?’ Henry pushes the covers off. His leg is fatly bandaged. ‘I have nothing this week. And nothing from Hutton in Brussels either. Is someone stopping our messengers, or are they reporting straight to you these days? Who is the king, you or me?’
Our sovereign lord is back, he thinks; for an hour speechless and choking, but now imperious: the mirror of all rulers, his flickering light scarcely visible against the sunlight of a May morning.
Henry says, ‘Cromwell, I remember Greenwich. When I. When you.’ He cannot easily speak of his death. ‘I do not remember the fall. Only blackness. I thought myself extinct. My senses were stopped. I believe I saw angels.’
He thinks, at the time you said not.
Inside a tent the king was stretched out his full length, pale as paper. Henry Norris was intoning the prayers for the dead. The Duke of Suffolk was bawling like a teething babe. Outside the Boleyns were shouting their own names, and Uncle Norfolk was bellowing that he was in charge now: ‘Me, me, me.’
‘Yesterday,’ the king says, ‘you were far away, and I thought I should die alone.’
He recalls the howling surge of servants and lords, his bellowing for quiet; his palm on the king’s chest, the pounding of his own heart. Then beneath the horsehair padding of the king’s jacket, a fibrillation, like a scamper of shrews’ paws. After a second, Henry gasped; he groaned; he coughed violently, and uttered, ‘Thomas Cromwell.’ The shocked lords wailed, ‘Lie down, lie down!’ but Henry levered himself upright; his eyes turned, and took in the scene. Alive again, he looked at England. He saw her dark valleys and green fields, her broad silver waters, her nightingale woods. He saw her just laws, her free people, he heard their prayers.