Hilary Mantel - Wolf Hall

‘I don't employ anyone slow.’ He nods. ‘Still, I take the point. Don't kill the witnesses.’

The trial of the king's great matter is approaching. The king intends to show that when Queen Katherine came to him she was not a virgin, having consummated her marriage with his brother Arthur. To that end he is assembling the gentlemen who attended the royal couple after their wedding at Baynard's Castle, then later at Windsor, where the court moved in November that year, and later at Ludlow, where they were sent to play at Prince and Princess of Wales. ‘Arthur,’ Wolsey says, ‘would have been about your age, Thomas, if he had lived.’ The attendants, the witnesses, are at least a generation older. And so many years have gone by – twenty-eight, to be precise. How good can their memories be?

It should never have come to this – to this public and unseemly exposure. Cardinal Campeggio has implored Katherine to bow to the king's will, accept that her marriage is invalid and retire to a convent. Certainly, she says sweetly, she will become a nun: if the king will become a monk.

Meanwhile she presents reasons why the legatine court should not try the issue. It is still sub judice at Rome, for one thing. For another, she is a stranger, she says, in a strange country; she ignores the decades in which she's been intimate with every twist and turn of English policy. The judges, she claims, are biased against her; certainly, she has reason to believe it. Campeggio lays hand on heart, and assures her he would give an honest judgment, even if he were in fear of his life. Katherine finds him too intimate with his co-legate; anyone who has spent much time with Wolsey, she thinks, no longer knows what honesty is.

Who is advising Katherine? John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. ‘Do you know what I can't endure about that man?’ the cardinal says. ‘He's all skin and bone. I abhor your skeletal prelate. It makes the rest of us look bad. One looks … corporeal.’

He is in his corporeal pomp, his finest scarlet, when the king and queen are summoned before the two cardinals at Blackfriars. Everyone had supposed that Katherine would send a proxy, but instead she appears in person. The whole bench of bishops is assembled. The king answers to his name, in a full, echoing voice, speaking out of his big bejewelled chest. He, Cromwell, would have advised a motion of the hand, a murmur, a dip of the head to the court's authority. Most humility, in his view, is pretence; but the pretence can be winning.

The hall is packed. He and Rafe are far-off spectators. Afterwards, when the queen has made her statement – a few men have been seen to cry – they come out into the sunshine. Rafe says, ‘If we had been nearer, we could have seen whether the king could meet her eye.’

‘Yes. That is really all anyone needs to know.’

‘I'm sorry to say it, but I believe Katherine.’

‘Hush. Believe nobody.’

Something blots out the light. It is Stephen Gardiner, black and scowling, his aspect in no way improved by his trip to Rome.

‘Master Stephen!’ he says. ‘How was your journey home? Never pleasant, is it, to come back empty-handed? I've been feeling sorry for you. I suppose you did your best, such as it is.’

Gardiner's scowl deepens. ‘If this court can't give the king what he wants, your master will be finished. And then it is I who will feel sorry for you.’

‘Except you won't.’

‘Except I won't,’ Gardiner concedes; and moves on.

The queen does not return for the sordid parts of the proceedings. Her counsel speaks for her; she has told her confessor how her nights with Arthur left her untouched, and she has given him permission to break the seal of the confessional and make her assertion public. She has spoken before the highest court there is, God's court; would she lie, to the damnation of her soul?

Besides, there is another point, which everyone has in mind. After Arthur died, she was presented to prospective bridegrooms – to the old king, as it may be, or to the young Prince Henry – as fresh meat. They could have brought a doctor, who would have looked at her. She would have been frightened, she would have cried; but she would have complied. Perhaps now she wishes it had been so; that they had brought in a strange man with cold hands. But they never asked her to prove what she claimed; perhaps people were not so shameless in those days. The dispensations for her marriage to Henry were meant to cover either case: she was/was not a virgin. The Spanish documents are different from the English documents, and that is where we should be now, among the subclauses, studying paper and ink, not squabbling in a court of law over a shred of skin and a splash of blood on a linen sheet.

If he had been her adviser, he would have kept the queen in court, however much she squealed. Because, would the witnesses have spoken, to her face, as they spoke behind her back? She would be ashamed to face them, gnarled and grizzled and each equipped with perfect recollection; but he would have had her greet them cordially, and declare she would never have recognised them, after so much time gone by; and ask if they have grandchildren, and whether the summer heat eases their elderly aches and pains? The greater shame would be theirs: would they not hesitate, would they not falter, under the steady gaze of the queen's honest eyes?

Without Katherine present, the trial becomes a bawdy entertainment. The Earl of Shrewsbury is before the court, a man who fought with the old king at Bosworth. He recalls his own long-ago wedding night, when he was, like Prince Arthur, a boy of fifteen; never had a woman before, he says, but did his duty to his bride. On Arthur's wedding night, he and the Earl of Oxford had taken the prince to Katherine's chamber. Yes, says the Marquis of Dorset, and I was there too; Katherine lay under the coverlet, the prince got into bed beside her. ‘No one is willing to swear to having climbed in with them,’ Rafe whispers. ‘But I wonder they haven't found someone.’

The court must make do with evidence of what was said next morning. The prince, coming out of the bridal chamber, said he was thirsty and asked Sir Anthony Willoughby for a cup of ale. ‘Last night I was in Spain,’ he said. A little boy's crude joke, dragged back into the light; the boy has been, these thirty years, a corpse. How lonely it is to die young, to go down into the dark without any company! Maurice St John is not there with him, in his vault at Worcester Cathedral: nor Mr Cromer nor William Woodall, nor any of the men who heard him say, ‘Masters, it is good pastime to have a wife.’

When they have listened to all this, and they come out into the air, he feels strangely cold. He puts a hand to his face, touches his cheekbone. Rafe says, ‘It would be a poor sort of bridegroom who would come out in the morning and say, “Good day, masters. Nothing done!” He was boasting, wasn't he? That was all. They've forgotten what it's like to be fifteen.’

Even as the court is sitting, King François in Italy is losing a battle. Pope Clement is preparing to sign a new treaty with the Emperor, Queen Katherine's nephew. He doesn't know this when he says, ‘This is a bad day's work. If we want Europe to laugh at us, they've every reason now.’

He looks sideways at Rafe, whose particular problem, clearly, is that he cannot imagine anyone, even a hasty fifteen-year-old, wanting to penetrate Katherine. It would be like copulation with a statue. Rafe, of course, has not heard the cardinal on the subject of the queen's former attractions. ‘Well, I reserve judgment. Which is what the court will do. It's all they can do.’ He says, ‘Rafe, you are so much closer in these matters. I can't remember being fifteen.’

‘Surely? Were you not fifteen or so when you fetched up in France?’