Hilary Mantel - Bring Up the Bodies

‘You must not blame yourself. Your master will know you did all you could. After all, you are sent here to watch the king, you cannot be too long from London in the winter.’

He thinks, I have been there since Katherine’s trials began: a hundred scholars, a thousand lawyers, ten thousand hours of argument. Almost since the first word was spoken against her marriage, for the cardinal kept me informed; late at night with a glass of wine, he would talk about the king’s great matter and how he saw it would work out.

Badly, he said.

‘Oh, this fire,’ Chapuys says. ‘Do you call this a fire? Do you call this a climate?’ Smoke from the wood eddies past them. ‘Smoke and smells and no heat!’

‘Get a stove. I’ve got stoves.’

‘Oh, yes,’ the ambassador moans, ‘but then the servants stuff them with rubbish and they blow up. Or the chimneys fall apart and you have to send across the sea for a man to fix them. I know all about stoves.’ He rubs his blue hands. ‘I told her chaplain, you know. When she is on her deathbed, I said, ask her whether Prince Arthur left her a virgin or not. All the world must believe a declaration made by a dying woman. But he is an old man. In his grief and trouble he forgot. So now we will never be sure.’

That is a large admission, he thinks: that the truth may be other than what Katherine told us all these years. ‘But do you know,’ Chapuys says, ‘before I left her, she said a troubling thing to me. She said, “It might be all my fault. That I stood out against the king, when I could have made an honourable withdrawal and let him marry again.” I said to her, madam – because I was amazed – madam, what are you thinking, you have right on your side, the great weight of opinion, both lay and clerical – “Ah but,” she said to me, “to the lawyers there was doubt in the case. And if I erred, then I drove the king, who does not brook opposition, to act according to his worse nature, and therefore I partly share in the guilt of his sin.” I said to her, good madam, only the harshest authority would say so; let the king bear his own sins, let him answer for them. But she shook her head.’ Chapuys shakes his, distressed, perplexed. ‘All those deaths, the good Bishop Fisher, Thomas More, the sainted monks of the Charterhouse…“I am going out of life,” she said, “dragging their corpses.”’

He is silent. Chapuys crosses the room to his desk and opens a little inlaid box. ‘Do you know what this is?’

He picks up the silk flower, carefully in case it falls to dust in his fingers. ‘Yes. Her present from Henry. Her present when the New Year’s prince was born.’

‘It shows the king in a good light. I would not have believed him so tender. I am sure I would not have thought to do it.’

‘You are a sad old bachelor, Eustache.’

‘And you a sad old widower. What did you give your wife, when your lovely Gregory was born?’

‘Oh, I suppose…a gold dish. A gold chalice. Something to set up on her shelf.’ He hands back the silk flower. ‘A city wife wants a present she can weigh.’

‘Katherine gave me this rose as we parted,’ Chapuys says. ‘She said, it is all I have to bequeath. She told me, choose a flower from the coffer and go. I kissed her hand and took to the road.’ He sighs. He drops the flower on his desk and slides his hands into his sleeves. ‘They tell me the concubine is consulting diviners to tell the sex of her child, although she did that before and they all told her it was a boy. Well, the queen’s death has altered the position of the concubine. But not perhaps in the way she would like.’

He lets that pass. He waits. Chapuys says, ‘I am informed that Henry paraded his little bastard about the court when he heard the news.’

Elizabeth is a forward child, he tells the ambassador. But then you must remember that, when he was hardly a year older than his daughter is now, the young Henry rode through London, perched on the saddle of a warhorse, six feet from the ground and gripping the pommel with fat infant fists. You should not discount her, he tells Chapuys, just because she is young. The Tudors are warriors from their cradle.

‘Ah, well, yes,’ Chapuys flicks a speck of ash from his sleeve. ‘Assuming she is a Tudor. Which some people do doubt. And the hair proves nothing, Cremuel. Considering I could go out on the street and catch half a dozen redheads without a net.’

‘So,’ he says, laughing, ‘you consider Anne’s child could have been fathered by any passer-by?’

The ambassador hesitates. He does not like to admit he has been listening to French rumours. ‘Anyway,’ he sniffs, ‘even if she is Henry’s child, she is still a bastard.’

‘I must leave you.’ He stands up. ‘Oh. I should have brought back your Christmas hat.’

‘You may have custody of it.’ Chapuys huddles into himself. ‘I shall be in mourning for some time. But do not wear it, Thomas. You will stretch it out of shape.’

Call-Me-Risley comes straight from the king, with news of the funeral arrangements.

‘I said to him, Majesty, you will bring the body to St Paul’s? He said, she can be laid to rest in Peterborough, Peterborough is an ancient and honourable place and it will cost less. I was astonished. I persisted, I said to him, these things are done by precedent. Your Majesty’s sister Mary, the Duke of Suffolk’s wife, was taken to Paul’s to lie in state. And do you not call Katherine your sister? And he said, ah but, my sister Mary was a royal lady, once married to the King of France.’ Wriothesley frowns. ‘And Katherine is not royal, he claims, though both her parents were sovereigns. The king said, she will have all she is entitled to as Dowager Princess of Wales. He said, where is the cloth of estate that was put over the hearse when Arthur died? It must be somewhere in the Wardrobe. It can be reused.’

‘That makes sense,’ he says. ‘The Prince of Wales’s feathers. There wouldn’t be time to weave a new one. Unless we keep her lingering above ground for it.’

‘It appears that she asked for five hundred masses for her soul,’ Wriothesley says. ‘But I was not about to tell Henry that, because from day to day one never knows what he believes. Anyway, the trumpets blew. And he marched off to Mass. And the queen with him. And she was smiling. And he had a new gold chain.’

Wriothesley’s tone suggests he is curious: just that. It passes no judgement on Henry.

‘Well,’ he says, ‘if you’re dead, Peterborough is as good a place as any.’

Richard Riche is up in Kimbolton taking an inventory, and has started a spat with Henry about Katherine’s effects; not that Riche loved the old queen, but he loves the law. Henry wants her plate and her furs, but Riche says, Majesty, if you were never married to her, she was a feme sole not a feme covert , if you were not her husband you have no right to lay hands on her property.

He has been laughing over it. ‘Henry will get the furs,’ he says. ‘Riche will find the king a way around it, believe me. You know what she should have done? Bundled them up and given them to Chapuys. There’s a man who feels the chill.’

A message comes, for Anne the queen from the Lady Mary, in reply to her kind offer to be a mother to her. Mary says she has lost the best mother in the world and has no need for a substitute. As for fellowship with her father’s concubine, she would not degrade herself. She would not hold hands with someone who has shaken paws with the devil.

He says, ‘Perhaps the timing was awry. Perhaps she had heard of the dancing. And the yellow dress.’

Mary says she will obey her father, so far as her honour and her conscience allow. But that is all she will do. She will not make any statement or take any oath that requires her to recognise that her mother was not married to her father, or to accept a child of Anne Boleyn as heir of England.